Bellagrand: A Novel

by Simons, Paullina

  “It’s not his fault he’s hated by the police. It’s because he’s so effective. And you told me to get a job.”

  “Harry,” said Gina. “There are a number of jobs I could get that might not be palatable from your perspective, if you know what I mean. If you said to me, get a job, and I came back with something less than maritally appropriate, would you be blasé about it?”

  “Okay, you’re comparing Bill Haywood to Miss Camilla’s merry girls by the railroad tracks?”

  “A man acquitted on a technicality for murdering another man in front of his own home is going to pay you for doing whatever he tells you?” Gina tightened her grip on the chair. “Yeah, I’d say it’s worse.”

  Harry put down the wineglasses without pouring.

  “Since when did you become so fastidious?” he asked coldly. “I don’t recall you turning up your nose at your radical anarchist Emma Goldman, whose speeches inspired a man to assassinate a president.”

  “Emma Goldman is all talk,” said Gina. “Bill Haywood is violent action. He calls it direct action. But we know what he means, don’t we?” She put her hands together in supplication. “We’re having a baby. We have to think about these fine distinctions.”

  “Did you think about those distinctions as you illegally distributed Goldman’s pamphlets on birth control in felonious violation of the Comstock Act?”

  “That was obviously a major failure,” she said, placing her hands on her churning and twisting abdomen. She didn’t have the stomach for a fight.

  “On her part or yours?”

  “On mine.”

  He watched her warily for a few moments. “Don’t be upset,” he said. “We need the work. I don’t want to disappoint you. It’ll be all right. I’ll stay with Bill just until something better comes along. He gave me a small advance for Christmas. At least we’ll be all right until the new year.”

  Grabbing the bottle, Gina poured the wine herself. “Better count your Advent blessings now, Bill Haywood’s flunky,” she said, raising her glass to her husband. “If I’ve read about him correctly, there’ll be precious few of them soon.”

  They clinked, drank their wine. The fight always fizzled out of the both of them. Intimacy was a salve to smooth the sharpest edges.

  “Big Bill thinks I’m too involved with you,” Harry said that night in bed. “He says I can’t be of help to him if my allegiance is divided.”

  Gina wrapped her arms, her legs around her husband. “Did you tell him your allegiance isn’t divided at all? It is wholly to me.”

  “You’re just making his point. Bill told me that great men cannot be great or become great when they are surrounded”—he groaned—“by their women.”

  She did not unwrap herself. “And you believe him?”

  “Right now, I can’t think straight.”

  The covers went over their heads. The covers flew off their overheated bodies.

  Afterward: “Can you think straight now?”

  “I fear he may be right.”

  Gina shook her head in exasperation, in muted affection. “Truly,” she said, “and in this case literally, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

  Chapter 2

  ANNIE LOPIZO

  One

  FROM CHILDHOOD, GINA ALWAYS hated it when her mother was right. Now that she was an adult, she liked it even less. And what was worse was the number of things Mimoo was right about, and what was even more infuriating was the way her mother always knew it. Her powers of observation unabated despite faltering eyesight, onslaught of age, and general indifference, Mimoo continued to call them as she saw them.

  So when Mimoo heard about the job Harry finally found, the only thing she said was, “I pray that Bill doesn’t make you his financial secretary, Harry.”

  Gina glared at her impervious-to-glares mother.

  When Angela had first brought Arturo home in the palm of her hand like a shiny display of male greatness, Mimoo took one look at him and barely waiting until he had left, said to her niece, “Angie, are you a fool? Do you not see that awful man is no good for you?” With Angela’s immediate family back in Sicily, Mimoo had taken it upon herself to be a surrogate mother to the young woman.

  Angela kissed her. “You think no one is good enough for me, Mimoo. I love you.”

  “No,” Mimoo said calmly. “Just him.”

  “But he is wonderful! He writes poetry. He studied to be a seminarian . . .”

  “Is he in the seminary now?”

  “Well, no . . .”

  “Exactly.”

  In 1908 Emma Goldman had been scheduled to speak on the Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Drama. Gina had asked Harry if he wanted to go and he said, “I don’t want to go to Boston right now. Or possibly ever again. Anarchism and socialism are like two magnetic norths. You go. Take Angela with you.”

  “You never want to come with me anywhere anymore,” Gina said. “You used to come to all my meetings before we were married.”

  “That was courtship,” Harry replied. “Listening to anarchic blather equating marriage to slavery. Nodding my head at sermons against subjugated women. That’s the way I got you to marry me.”

  “You’re teasing me, mio sposo.”

  “Am I? Are you married to me or no?”

  Angela started going with Gina instead, like Verity once used to. Together they listened to “The Economic Crisis: Its Cause and Remedy,” “Syndicalism: A New Phase of the Labor Struggle,” “Woman Under Anarchism,” and “The Relation of Anarchism to Trade Unionism.”

  The last was the speech that changed Angela’s life, though according to Mimoo not for the better, because that’s when she met Arturo Giovannitti.

  Arturo had emigrated from Naples in 1901, barely speaking English. He was tall, good-looking, arrogant, loud. He had indeed studied briefly at the Theological Seminary. Heavy-set, thick-browed Angela, friendly, happy, for years waiting for a suitable man, was smitten. She never had a chance. “Like me, Harry,” Gina had said, nonplussed when he didn’t reply right away. “You mean like me,” he said to her, upon further nudging.

  Arturo described himself as a union leader, a socialist, a poet, and he brought with him to the conference center his friend, Joe Ettor, “Smiling Joe” of the Industrial Workers of the World. Joe cast his eyes on the dark-haired, tall, and dramatic Gina, who flashed her wedding ring and invited him back to Lawrence to meet her husband. Joe got the hint, but came for dinner anyway. He and Harry hit it off—that evening and many evenings that followed—expounding on Marx’s dialectical materialism and on economic development being the foundation of all life. Evening after joyful inebriated evening they played cards, told jokes, and dreamed of a true socialist state, one that didn’t yet exist, where money, prices, and markets were abolished, and all capitalist property confiscated and divided among the people.

  Joe and Arturo became fascinated by Lawrence, the woolen and worsted production center of the world, a flourishing yet deeply troubled textile town. Joe had worked as a waterboy on railroads, filed saws at lumber mills, was a barrel maker, a shipyard worker, and had been last employed at a cigar factory. He began his work with the IWW as a community organizer and became an outstanding public speaker. He spent years taking Arturo with him, traveling the country and organizing miners, migrant laborers, and foreign-born workers. Twice he had persuaded Harry, who just happened to be in between jobs, to go with him and Arturo to help them write their speeches. Both men looked up to Harry, revering his contemplative bookishness. Where they were brash, he was quiet, where they shouted, he spoke softly, where they were full of rhetorical passions, he engaged coolly in reasoned argument.

  Aided by Harry’s speechwriting, they had put together the Brooklyn shoe factory strike earlier in 1911. Buoyed by the success in Brooklyn, Joe and Arturo returned to Lawrence, rented two rooms off Lowell Street, close to where Angela now lived with her friend Pamela, and settled into intoxicated vigilance. They were convinced something big wa
s going to happen in Lawrence, and they wanted to be there when it did.

  And so during Christmas of 1911, Arturo huddled with Angela, Harry, and Joe at the little round table like battle headquarters in the kitchen of Mimoo’s rented house on Summer Street and tried to make heads or tails of American Woolen’s recent actions. Gina stood by the kitchen sink and watched warily, nervous before, nauseated now. Why was she agreeing with Mimoo? Why did this agitation around Christmastime smell like nothing but a pot of trouble?

  The Lawrence mills were the world’s largest producers of textile products and needed vast numbers of laborers, mostly unskilled and underage women. After the invention of the two-loom system, the pace became grueling, the repetition and boredom dangerous, and the frequent injuries job-and-family-destroying. So after the textile union vigorously lobbied for two fewer hours of work a week, the Massachusetts legislature cut maximum hours from fifty-six to fifty-four. Fred Ayer and his son-in-law William Wood of American Woolen, who owned and operated all the mills in Lawrence, said with nary a complaint: ladies, you wanted it? It is done. Merry Christmas.

  American Woolen’s instant agreement prompted a sudden and direct action of the entire cauldron’s brew of the IWW to descend onto Lawrence in December of 1911 like it was Paris in 1789. The main question on every socialist’s mind was: why would American Woolen give in to the demands so quickly? This puzzled the four heads on Summer Street, and unsettled Gina.

  Salvo didn’t come home for Christmas, his absence a black sore at the table. Mimoo and Gina didn’t discuss it. Mimoo prayed more than usual, which is to say, nearly all day. It was Christmas, after all, she said. Prayers were in order. But on Christmas Eve she couldn’t help herself; she accused Harry of heartlessness in abandoning his family.

  “Do you not see me?” she said to him, having had too much holiday cheer in the form of red port. “I don’t have my son on Christmas. I weep with despair. You don’t think your father and your sister feel the same about not having you with them on Christmas?”

  “No, I don’t think they do.”

  “You’re blind inside your soul!”

  “Mimoo, they threw me out,” Harry said in self-defense. “I didn’t leave like Salvo, of my own free will. They forced me out, told me I would never be welcome in their home again. My father disowned me. He stopped my access to our family accounts. They did this because I had the gall to marry your daughter.”

  Mimoo harrumphed in agreement. “He felt betrayed by you. He lost his temper.”

  “My father never loses his temper. He said exactly what he meant. He did exactly what he intended. He told me he didn’t have a son anymore.”

  “You’re a fool, Harry. Gina, you married a fool. Do you know how impossible what you’re saying is? A father cannot abandon his children.”

  Gina tried to comfort her mother. “Mimoo, they’re not like us,” she said. “They don’t feel the same way about their children.”

  Mimoo staggered from the table. “You don’t think a man feels most deeply about his only son?” she said. “Are you even my daughter? Think what you’re saying. His only son!”

  “Honestly, Mimoo, believe him.”

  “A man who doesn’t feel deeply about his son feels deeply about nothing.”

  “Well, then, Mimoo,” said Harry, “perhaps you’ve answered your own question.”

  Holding on to the railing, the old woman slowly climbed the stairs, refusing Gina’s help. “You are both blind. Because you haven’t had children. Just you wait. Wait till August. Then you’ll understand.”

  They rang in the New Year of 1912 with champagne and roast pig. Arturo told Angela that maybe this summer, if all went well, they could be married.

  Mimoo snorted all the way up the stairs, loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  “Mimoo, you’re embarrassing him,” said Angela after the men had left. “You know he can hear you, right?”

  “I hope the dead can hear me. Madre di Dio. Do you hear me? Did he give you a ring?”

  “He doesn’t have the money right now.”

  “He has money to spend on his cigarettes and train rides all across the country, doesn’t he? And every time I see him he’s wearing a new suit.”

  “Rings are expensive,” Angela said, calling downstairs to her cousin. “Gina, how much was your ring?”

  In the kitchen cleaning up the wineglasses, Gina inquisitively tapped at Harry, reading the paper. “How should I know?” he said with a shrug. “I walked into the jeweler’s and picked out the largest stone. My father got the bill.”

  Gina stared at the fourth finger on her left hand. The two-carat princess-cut diamond sparkled. She cleaned it every morning, even before she cleaned her teeth. It was like something out of someone else’s life.

  “He says it wasn’t that expensive, Mimoo,” Gina yelled up to the bedroom.

  “Is he going to lure you into a pretend marriage,” Mimoo asked Angela, “like that Harry with my daughter?”

  “Mimoo, we are not in a pretend marriage!” Gina called from downstairs. “And also, Harry can hear you.”

  “No, Mimoo,” said Angela, sitting on the corner of the bed and smiling. “Unlike Harry with Gina, Arturo is going to marry me properly, in a church. Because as you know, the Italian atheist rhetoric is all for show. There is no such thing as an Italian atheist.”

  Downstairs, Harry glanced up from his newspaper to catch Gina’s eye for a reply to the truth of that. She crossed herself and bowed in assent before kissing him with champagne on her lips.

  “There is also no ring,” an implacable Mimoo pointed out upstairs.

  Gina waved her ring hand at Harry, wondering how much her rock was worth and if she pawned it, would she ever be able to get together the money to buy it back.

  Two

  RIGHT AFTER THE HOLIDAYS, in the first week in January, the Lawrence women returned to work. Five days later, when they received their paychecks, they discovered there had been a small error. They got paid half a dollar less than the previous week.

  Arturo asked Angela to perform some simple math. And lo! It turned out that, yes indeed, they were working two hours less a week, just as they had requested. But now they were getting two hours less pay.

  That Friday night Arturo paced around the Summer Street parlor like a self-satisfied peacock, saying, “I told you. I told you. I knew they were up to no good, and I was right.”

  Two hundred women, Angela at the forefront, dragging with her a desperately reluctant Gina, showed up the next Monday in front of the red doors of Wood Mill at the T-junction of Union and Essex, loudly demanding that the accounting error be corrected immediately since they were not returning to work until it was.

  The manager of American Woolen, Lester Evans, a small polite man, came outside to talk to Angela and Gina.

  “Why are you ladies upset?” he asked calmly, dressed in his tailored finery. “Stop shouting. What is the problem? Do you think you should be getting paid the same for less work?”

  “YES!” came the defiant cries. Gina stayed quiet.

  “But you all received a generous raise when you negotiated your last contract barely four months ago. Are you saying it’s not enough?”

  “SHORT PAY!”

  “Why would we pay you more for working less? That hardly seems fair.”

  “NO CUT IN PAY! NO CUT IN PAY!”

  “What’s not fair is the cut in pay,” Angela shouted into Lester’s face, strengthened by the yelling women at her back, like a sail in the tail winds.

  “But you didn’t receive a cut in pay,” Lester said amiably.

  “Yes, a cut in pay!”

  “You’re playing with the big boys now, Annie LoPizo,” Lester told her. “In the real world you get paid for the hours you work. You don’t work, you don’t get paid.”

  The women had no strategy but to continue shouting. Lester had had enough. Before he left he pointed a finger at Gina. “You have a good job,” he said to her. “You get paid w
ell for the work you do. Don’t ruin your life by involving yourself in this malarkey. Stay away. I’ve seen this before. It’s nothing but trouble.”

  All the nerve endings in Gina’s body agreed.

  ***

  That evening when he heard what had happened, Arturo ordered Angela and Gina to march right back to the mill doors the following morning and make clear to this Mr. Evans that not a single worker was returning to the looms until the “accounting error” was rectified. “Not a single one.”

  Shaking his head, Harry got up from the table. “Angie, you do what you want,” he said. “Listen to Arturo, don’t listen to him, it’s no difference to me. You’re a grown woman. But don’t involve my wife in this.”

  “She is also a grown woman! She also got paid two hours less.”

  “Yes, Harry, what are you talking about?” Arturo said, frowning. “You’re involved in this.”

  “I didn’t say me. I said her.”

  “What could you be thinking?”

  “You know what I’m thinking,” Harry said, pulling Gina by her wrist from the table, nudging her up the stairs, away, away. “Because I just told you. I’ll do what I have to, but keep her out of it.”

  Angela followed Gina upstairs behind a shut bedroom door. “Are you really not going to come with me?” she asked disbelievingly.

  “I can’t, Ange. We’re having a baby. We need the money.”

  “What money? There is no money. Gina, if there is a strike, no one will get paid.”

  Gina turned jelly-legged. She sat on the bed. “Maybe it’ll all be over by tomorrow.”

  “How in the world . . .”

  “Maybe cooler heads will prevail.”

  “Are you saying I’m not in my right mind?”

  “I’m saying we need the money. Don’t you?”