Bellagrand: A Novel

by Simons, Paullina

  “Maybe next time I could help a bit more?”

  “Help do what?” asked Gina.

  “I don’t know. This place is run by women. There must be something a man could do. Fix a window? Repair a doorknob?”

  Rose put her grateful hand on Ben’s. “You know one of my deepest regrets is that no matter how I try I can never get good devoted men to come and shoulder the burden of this work, care for the sick men the way we attend to sick women.”

  Ben lowered his head to her. “I don’t know about attending to the sick, Sister Alphonsa,” he said, using the name Rose had adopted when she joined the convent. “But I’ll fix your windows and patch your doors.”

  “Oh!” Gina said. “We have dozens of projects like that.”

  “We certainly do,” said Rose. “Our Ben can also be a servant of relief.”

  After they passed Andover and neared Lawrence, Ben slowed down his vehicle. Gina hadn’t nearly finished her story of the last ten years of her life.

  “Since he got mixed up with that horrible Cyclops of a man,” Gina was telling Ben, “it’s been nothing but trouble. And do you know why?”

  “Because wherever that man goes, trouble follows?”

  “Exactly. Lawrence strike, people dead. Paterson strike, people dead.” Gina shook her head. “Do you know who else Harry met in Paterson? John Reed. Have you heard of him?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. Should I have? I haven’t been following the strikes and the radicals.”

  “And Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. She is quite the inspired feminist, that one.” Gina’s mouth tightened in flagrant disapproval. “He was gone for months gallivanting with them, carousing . . .”

  “Not Harry, not carousing.”

  “And then they all got arrested.”

  “For carousing? Or gallivanting?”

  “For conspiracy to incite riots. And this time he was a member of the IWW. He broke the terms of his parole five ways to Sunday. John Reed and Max Eastman bailed him out. Someone had to. His bail was set at a thousand dollars!”

  Ben tightened his grip on the wheel.

  “But now he’s in union with the Greenwich Village radicals. He calls himself a revolutionary. Harry, your oldest friend, my bookish quiet husband, a revolutionary! Can you believe it?”

  “No. Perhaps just a drawing-room revolutionary?”

  Gina shook her head. “He keeps talking of moving to New York when he gets out.”

  “When is he getting out?”

  “Not sure. He served a reduced sentence for the Paterson strike, six months or so, and not long after he got out, in May, the archduke got shot! So Harry started protesting a war that hadn’t begun. This time there wasn’t even a trial.” Gina sighed, deeply weary. “He received a mandatory five-year sentence that for a reason I can’t fathom got reduced to two. Can’t be Elston Purdy, Harry’s public defender, as he is awful. But Purdy assures me Harry will be out in time for Christmas. Apparently he’s a model prisoner.” She swallowed. “Between the arrests and the strikes, I can’t help but think he wants to be away.”

  Ben made an incredulous sound as he drove on. “It can’t be that.”

  “You don’t think so? Then why would he, knowing he’s out on probation, be charging an army recruiting station, blocking the entrance, yelling, ‘Commercial rivals are having a fight and for that our young boys are going to die?’ ”

  Ben shook his head.

  “While you were building and opening the engineering wonder of the modern world,” said Gina, “some man named Franz Ferdinand was murdered in Bosnia and because of a random death half a world away, my husband is once again in prison.”

  She didn’t speak again until they were back in Lawrence.

  They got home around nine. No one was in. Saturday nights Mimoo went to vespers and played bingo. Salvo was out God knows where. He told his sister he served beer in a saloon on Friday and Saturday nights. Gina and Mimoo never saw a penny of that money.

  Ben sat down at Gina’s formerly revolutionary table while she put together some potatoes with cold mustard chicken and opened a bottle of red wine. They sat down together and broke bread.

  “This is very good,” he said, eating hungrily. “But you don’t make Italian food anymore? Your brother was such a good cook.”

  “After what happened to his restaurants, no, we don’t make Italian food like we used to. No one wants to cook it, no one wants to eat it.”

  “You know, Gina,” Ben said, “years ago when I learned that Harry helped Salvo, everybody thought I was upset because of you, but really I was just jealous because I thought he’d be having Italian food every night.”

  Flushing at Ben’s casual admission that once there was a time when he might have been upset over her, Gina tried to respond in kind—lightly. “Well, Harry did have it every night,” she said lowering her eyes. “Now he has it sporadically.”

  “That’s a real shame,” said Ben. “So where’s your brother?”

  “During the week he works at Purity in the North End. On the weekends he’s back home. We see him much more now that Harry’s away. Mimoo is happy. It’s quite a predicament. On the one hand, my husband is in prison, on the other hand, my brother is home.”

  Ben finished eating. “So what happened?” he asked quietly, wiping his mouth on a napkin. “I thought the restaurants were doing so well.” He poured Gina more wine.

  “Esther didn’t tell you?”

  “Esther doesn’t know what happened. She just knows they were sold. Tell me. We have time. When is Mimoo coming home?”

  “Eleven. And she’ll be delighted to find you here.”

  Ben smiled. “Just like old times.”

  They sat at the table as Gina poured out her life to Ben, all the Salvo, Harry, and Angela miseries of it.

  Five

  AFTER THE ELOPEMENT SALVO invites Harry, who’s “between jobs” to come work at the family’s two restaurants. Harry says, “Doing what? I can’t make pizza.”

  They laugh. “Of course you can’t.” Because he isn’t Italian.

  Harry mopes for days, and only when Gina presses him does he reveal to her the contents of the letter he recently received from Herman Barrington calling in the mortgage on Salvo’s two restaurants. Salvo has been slow in making the payments, and after what has transpired, Herman has no interest in remaining flexible. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you what a vindictive, cruel son of a bitch my father is. I know I should have said something sooner. Please don’t be upset with me. I tried to make it right. I even went to see him.” Harry can’t look at Gina’s dumbstruck face. “Do you know how hard that was? I went to him for help, to ask him to reconsider, to give Salvo a little more time to pay, and he wouldn’t let me in, wouldn’t come out to speak to me! Sent his lackey instead.”

  Herman’s letter about duties, responsibilities, betrayal, wrath, finalities hangs from Gina’s hands.

  Salvo reluctantly agrees to the solution Harry proposes and meets with Ervin Cassidy, the manager of the local First National Bank of Lawrence. After much back and forth, the bank manager offers Salvo a painful compromise: a payoff to Herman’s bank to settle the loans, and then a new mortgage. But the price of that transaction will be one of the restaurants.

  Salvo has no choice but to agree.

  The bank sells off the less profitable one, the upscale Alessandro’s, and leaves Salvo with a hefty mortgage for the bustling Antonio’s by the railroad. He makes lots of pizza to please the crowds and hopes in a few years to perhaps turn a profit.

  Harry doesn’t have a choice after that. The Attavianos need his help if they’re going to make it. Harry goes to work with Salvo in his one remaining restaurant.

  That’s the good news.

  The bad news: Harry goes to work with Salvo in his one remaining restaurant.

  It isn’t that Harry is a slow learner. It’s that he can’t find a role for himself in the many-spoked wheel that is the smooth operation of a family business. He
tries ordering supplies, but gets bored. He tries maintaining the equipment. Tedium. Writing advertising copy isn’t for him—too facile. Neither is placing ads in the local newspaper (too pushy) or coming up with ideas to draw more people in (really too pushy). He isn’t adept at running the weekly management meetings and has no idea how to solve the many petty but constant problems that crop up in a workplace with twenty-two employees and seventy-seven suppliers. He certainly doesn’t want to learn how to cook. Counting money at the end of the night makes him ornery. Walking to the bank, making deposits, paying the bills, calling in accounts—all grate on him.

  A tense year passes. And another.

  One fateful day in 1908, Angela comes to Salvo in confusion. She says she ran into the bank manager walking his dog on the Common, and the man told her that despite a dozen notices there has not been a mortgage payment in over three months and Antonio’s is five minutes away from going into default.

  Salvo and Gina go to the bank to clear up the mistake because they know, know, that Harry has been making deposits and telling Salvo everything is running like warm milk from morning cows. It’s an oversight. It must be.

  But apparently, as the meticulous bank records show, the flowing warm milk doesn’t entail paying the mortgage.

  The truth turns out to be worse than Salvo and Gina fear. How often does that happen? They are in the back office combing over the books, with Harry once again conveniently not around, when Margaret, their seating hostess, comes in to inform them she has been underpaid for the previous week. She patiently explains that for the past six months, Harry has been doubling her salary, until last week, with no explanation, he went back to paying her the woefully inadequate original wage.

  “The problem is, you see, we got quite used to the new salary and thought it was for keeps,” Margaret says. “My husband and I moved to a larger home, we went to Ohio to visit his mother, took a few weeks for ourselves, and now with Christmas coming up . . . I’m sorry but we just can’t afford a cut in pay.”

  Gina and Salvo sit like blackened statues. As she sits now in her dimly lit parlor room across from a stunned Ben as she recounts it. She doesn’t want to recount it. She wishes there were music instead. She wishes she could forget, talk about something else, never speak of it again, never think of it again, like the Bread and Roses strike, like Angela. Why does it all keep coming back up like disagreeable food?

  “Margaret,” Gina says in an even voice, keeping her squeezing hand on Salvo, who is the master of raised voices, “you didn’t get a cut in pay. You got an unauthorized and unapproved bonus, and the reason it stopped is because there is no extra money.”

  An unhappy Margaret, too broke to quit, says before walking out, “You’re going to have a mutiny on your hands. Because all of us who are not family have been getting extra money. And it’s Christmas for everybody, not just me. What are you going to do, not pay your staff extra on Christmas?”

  Gina and Salvo sit, pods of salt.

  “Don’t say a word, Salvo,” says Gina when Margaret leaves.

  “I’m going to kill him.”

  “I told you not to say a word.”

  “One way or another he better make this right, or I swear on our mother . . .”

  “Salvo!”

  Gina, afraid for both men she loves, runs out looking for Harry. She finds him on a bench in the back of City Hall, handsome, absent-minded, detached yet affectionate, wrapped in a huge overcoat, serenely eating his lunch in the cold, immersed in his reading.

  With the book still open, as if he doesn’t want her to bother him too much during his daily break, he tells her that, yes, he has been feeling bad for the people who work for them because they are having so much trouble making ends meet and they never have any extra for birthdays, a wedding, a vacation, a new house. One woman’s mother is sick and the doctor’s bills are large, one man’s boat has sprung a leak and the baker’s uncle died and the funeral expenses were a quarter of his annual salary. The dishwasher is having an unexpected third baby . . .

  Harry tells Gina all this and then leans back against the bench, glancing down into his tome as if there is no need for further discussion. They needed extra so he gave them extra, that’s all there is to it.

  “Harry,” Gina asks quietly, “you paid them out of what money?”

  “Out of the money we make every night.”

  “But that’s our operating money.”

  “Okay. Labor is part of the operating budget.”

  “But you already paid them a regular salary, yes? You paid them a fair wage for their labor?”

  “How can it be a fair wage when Eddie’s uncle needed to be buried?”

  Gina clamps her hands on her chest as if she is having a heart attack. “Because you have been overpaying the payroll, we don’t have enough to cover our mortgage. The note the bank holds against our restaurant is the one fixed capital expense we absolutely must pay.”

  “Labor is the one fixed capital expense we must pay.”

  “No, Harry. We can fire everyone and run the restaurant with just the family working for nothing, but if we don’t pay the mortgage, there will be no restaurant to run.”

  “You’re placing people below institutions, Gia,” he says. “Always a mistake and unlike you. I thought you and I were sewn of the same cloth. The bank can wait for its money. The people can’t.”

  “Harry, the bank has waited for its money. Over three months. Now we owe them not just next month’s payment, but the last quarter besides. And we need to pay it in the next twenty days.”

  “So let’s pay it.”

  “We don’t have it. Had you loaned our employees the money instead of simply giving it to them, the bank could see those loans as an asset, but as it stands . . .”

  “We’ll have to get it.” Harry is unconcerned. “It’ll be fine. The bank will wait.”

  “They won’t wait. They’ll take Salvo’s restaurant!”

  “No, they won’t. That’s just to scare you. I know how this works. I’ll go talk to them. Just . . . let me finish my lunch and this one chapter.” He shows her the book he’s reading: Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities. “Look what he writes, it’s brilliant! ‘Politics is business. That’s what’s the matter with politics. That’s what’s the matter with everything—art, literature, religion, journalism, law, medicine—they’re all business. Make politics a sport, as they do in England, or a profession, as they do in Germany.’ ” Harry clucks in deep approval. “Isn’t he something?”

  Gina has nothing to say.

  “Just let me finish this chapter and then we’ll go.”

  Harry goes to the bank. He goes with a barely contained Salvo and an overstrung Gina, who sits in the corner chair in Cassidy’s office and wants to break her fingers as she listens.

  Ervin Cassidy is a kindly man, but a stern one. His placid, portly demeanor belies a steely interior. “Mr. Barrington,” he says, “we’ve been writing to you for three months, and you’ve been ignoring our letters and requests for payment. Our bylaws are our bylaws. Your loan is not coming from my pocket. This bank has investors it has to answer to. You have a collateralized note on which you cannot be more than ninety days in arrears. And you are currently at one hundred and seventeen. On top of that,” he calmly continues, “you have been constantly, and I mean nearly every single month since we began servicing your loan, late with your payments. In the last forty-one months you have not paid your mortgage on time once. Sometimes you’re eleven days late, sometimes forty-two, sometimes twenty-nine. But you’re always late.”

  “We pay you eventually, don’t we,” Harry says sourly.

  “Not for the last one hundred and seventeen days you haven’t,” Cassidy says. “A few months ago you asked me to extend you an overdraft, using the restaurant as collateral. This I did for you. That account is also thousands of dollars in arrears.”

  “Perhaps you can increase the overdraft,” Harry says.

  “Why would we do
that?”

  “So we can pay you back the money we owe you.”

  The bank manager laughs softly, almost benignly, as if he is dealing with an irrational child. “You want us to increase your overdraft so you can pay us the money you owe us? You’re not even borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. You’re borrowing from Peter to pay Peter.”

  “It’s just accounting,” Harry says. “Moving the debt from one place to another.”

  “Yes,” Cassidy says. “But your debt has to be backed by the possibility of future earnings. The bank is not unreasonable, is it, to expect a small chance of being repaid?” Cassidy turns to Gina’s brother. “Salvatore, when you owned two restaurants, it was possible to increase revenue above the operating expense line. But as it stands right now, your one business will barely break even in the next three to five years. You have nothing extra to pay back the bank with.”

  “We’ll increase sales,” says an unconcerned Harry.

  “Mr. Barrington, let me explain to you how it works.”

  “I know how it works.”

  “The way it works,” Cassidy continues, as if he hasn’t been interrupted, “is first you increase sales and then you bring us your receipts and ask for a loan. Not vice versa. How would you increase your profits, may I ask? You’ve got two ovens and twenty tables. There is very little room for growth. You can increase your prices, but then you’ll have fewer customers. It’s a fine balance, running a business, which is why a high debt ratio breaks that balance, makes the whole equation untenable. I’m truly sorry.”

  “Mr. Cassidy,” Harry says, “we don’t have the money right now. But the bank has plenty of money. It’s not as if you’re going to go broke, or lose your business if you wait a little longer.”

  “That is where you’re quite wrong, Mr. Barrington. Quite mistaken. If we did what you’re proposing, we would indeed lose our business. And wait for what?”

  Harry sighs, finally shaking his head in frustration. “Okay, fine. Go ahead and charge us a higher rate of interest on the overdraft.”