Bellagrand: A Novel

by Simons, Paullina

  “We already are. And you can’t pay it. You know how I know? Because you haven’t paid it. And besides, charging you more to provide you with a service that you already can’t afford is doubly bad business. For you and for me. I’ve been doing this a long time, Mr. Barrington. Thirty-seven years. We are the First National Bank of Lawrence and we are very proud of our relationship with our customers, many of them immigrants, like your brother-in-law and your wife, who often fall on hard times. We help them as best we can—prudently. So that they don’t feel overwhelmed by debt and we still make money.”

  “Making money is the important thing, it seems,” Harry says. “That’s first, isn’t it?’

  Ervin Cassidy ices over after hearing Harry’s disrespectful tone. “Every single business in this town and in your father’s town and in every town in the United States is built with bank loans that are given to families such as your own,” he says, rising out of his chair. “We are the reason you have a restaurant in the first place. We are the reason your father has a thriving construction business, the reason there are roads and factories and carriages and horses. We are the reason the Panama Canal is being built. Where do you think this money comes from? The magic vault in the back? The bank has money because other people—not you, but other people—come to us and entrust it to us. They lend us their money for safekeeping, and then we turn around and lend their lifeblood to you so you can use their hard-earned savings to enrich your life. That’s how it works. Perhaps you should take an economics class, Mr. Barrington, to acquaint yourself with the rudiments of basic business practice. In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Wagner is waiting outside my office. She has applied for a loan for a new ice cream stand.”

  “What, we’re done here?” Salvo says, rising.

  “Yes, Salvatore. I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid we are. If I don’t see four months of mortgage payments on my desk in ten days, we will commence recovery of your business property. I will hold off calling in the overdraft to give you more time to pay, if that helps any.”

  The police have to be called to restrain Salvo in the public square on Essex Street. He attacks Harry, is arrested for assault and battery, and would be in jail, except Harry refuses to press charges. Salvo commands Harry to go to Herman Barrington and make it right. Harry says he will be damned before he ever shames himself again.

  “You are damned and you have already shamed us—our entire family and my sister most of all for being the biggest fool in Lawrence.”

  Salvo tells his mother that he cannot live another second under the same roof as the man who has single-handedly destroyed the business he came from Sicily to build. Either Harry leaves or Salvo will. But Harry can’t leave on his own. Gina has to go with him. So the choice is between Mimoo’s only daughter and her one remaining son. Caught in the Gordian crossfire, she refuses to make the devil’s choice. Salvo chooses for her. He packs his bags and leaves Lawrence for the North End.

  That was 1908.

  Antonio’s was auctioned at gavel to Ned Rector, who sold it piece by piece, making off with the pizza ovens, the tables, and the silverware and reopened six months later as Ned’s Mattresses and Beds, and six months after that as Ned’s Burgers.

  Six

  “SALVO HAS NOT FORGIVEN Harry?” Ben asked. “To this day?”

  Gina shook her head. “Would you?”

  “Why didn’t Salvo just partner with one of his friends in the North End?” Ben wanted to know. “It’s been a few years. Banks are more forgiving than your brother. They’d lend to him again, I’m sure.”

  Gina shook her head. “It’s unending work, running a business,” she said. “Salvo learned it the hard way. To do it right, he has to do it himself. But he doesn’t want to. Which is one of the reasons he gave so much control to Harry, who unfortunately happened to be the wrong man for the job. Besides, Salvo found out things about himself, too, during the fiasco. He doesn’t like to be pinned down. He wants to be able to change jobs, like he changes women, and move on to the next flight of fancy. He continues to blame Harry, who certainly deserves a fair portion of the blame for what happened, but the truth is, Salvo himself is ill-suited to the daily grind of running a business. Or a marriage. He’s too much of a wanderer.”

  “Oh, Gina.”

  “I know. Listen.” She leaned closer. “Tell me, are they . . . his father and his sister . . . are they still upset with him over what happened? It’s been so many years.”

  Ben also leaned forward, as if talking about difficult things required hushed voices. “All I know is that no one speaks of him. His name is never mentioned.”

  Gina sat back, exhaling with resignation and sadness.

  The front door opened, they both turned and in the porch light stood Mimoo, helped up the stairs by Rita, the renter from the third floor.

  “Who is this?” Mimoo said to Gina without preamble.

  “Well, I’m going to head up,” Rita said. “Your mother did well tonight. Won twenty dollars. Hit bingo three times.”

  “Who is this, Gina?” Mimoo repeated.

  “It’s Ben Shaw, Mimoo.”

  “Who?”

  Ben stood up to greet Gina’s mother. “Hello, Mrs. Attaviano.”

  “It’s Harry’s friend from years ago, Mimoo. Remember, Panama Canal?”

  “I remember everything,” said Mimoo, glaring at Gina and taking off her coat. “You’re looking for Harry in the wrong place, young man. He’s in the Correctional.”

  “Yes, I know,” Ben said. “I drove your daughter home so she wouldn’t have to take the train.”

  Mimoo walked past them, on her way upstairs. “Come help me,” she said to Gina. “I’m going to fall down I’m so tired. Bingo this late doesn’t come without a price.”

  Gina turned to Ben. “I have to run. Thank you so much for the ride. Sorry I kept you.”

  “It was my pleasure—” He was stopped by Mimoo’s loud snort from the bottom of the stairs. “Nice to see you again, Mimoo. Please give my regards to Salvo.”

  Upstairs, the first thing Mimoo said was “And you’re doing what, exactly?”

  “Harry’s old friend, Mother,” Gina said impatiently. “Basta.”

  “Your brother is out gallivanting somewhere, rowdy in a roadhouse, I’m sure. Good thing he didn’t come back early to see you gallivanting in your own house.”

  On Sunday, when Salvo did come back, barely making it in time for the start of the ten o’clock Mass, Gina leaned to her mother before the litany of supplication and whispered, “Oh, yes, Salvo is the one to judge me.”

  “Just because he lives in a glass house doesn’t mean he won’t throw stones.”

  And right after the service, barely out of St. Mary’s doors, Mimoo turned to her hungover, rumpled son and said, “You’ll never guess who drove your sister home from Concord yesterday.”

  “Do I dare guess?” said Salvo, squinting terribly in the morning sunshine and adjusting his gray serge cap so it covered his eyes.

  “Ben Shaw. Remember him? Some Panama foolishness long ago. Was that boy sweet on your sister, or what?”

  Salvo didn’t even turn his head to Gina, who was standing tall and elegant near the entrance, saying hello to the other parishioners, smiling, friendly, cleaned up for church, in a blue gingham dress and a wool coat, both old but pressed and well kept. Salvo’s parka coat was torn on one sleeve and stained with the revelry of many a Saturday night. “As long as it wasn’t her suddenly sprung-from-jail husband, it’s no never mind to me.”

  “Salvo, I don’t know whether to thank you or to smack you,” said Gina. “But what I must do is bid you both goodbye.”

  “Where are you off to?”

  “Where I’m off to every Sunday,” said Gina. “To visit my husband.”

  They sit across from each other. Roy, Harry’s guard, a burly, very large black man, born and bred free in the north, and now a sentinel over the incarcerated white man, has taken a real shine to Gina, and sometimes, when
he’s the only one on duty, he lets Harry touch her across the partition. When she hands him the newspaper he takes it from her and then holds her hands until Roy clears his throat. They sit. Sometimes they don’t say much.

  Sometimes it’s because there’s nothing to say.

  Sometimes it’s because there’s too much.

  Today they speak almost as if there are no penumbras.

  “What books did you bring me?” he asks. “I finished five days ago the two lousy ones you brought last week.”

  “Does lousy refer to the quantity of the books or their quality?”

  “Both.”

  She laughs.

  “They were terrible and there wasn’t nearly enough of them. Why can’t you bring me more? I’ve memorized the paper. It’s gotten so desperate I actually opened the Bible Roy left on my table pretending he forgot.”

  “Oh, dear, things can’t be that bad, mio marito,” she says, “that you’re reduced to reading the Bible.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “What, you didn’t like Sons and Lovers?”

  “Not much. That Oedipal bullshit. Not for me.”

  “What’s Oedipal?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I never read it.”

  “That’s fine. But just in case the rest of Lawrence’s oeuvre is from the same cloth, don’t bring him.”

  “How about The Man Without a Country?” she asks, teasing. “Can I bring that?”

  “I know that idiot thing by heart,” he says, frowning. “Why would you bring that to me here?”

  “I’m joking.”

  “Oh.”

  “Has prison excised your sense of humor, Harry?”

  “My irony meter is clearly down,” he says. “Don’t say things you don’t mean. At the very least smile when you say them so I know to laugh myself.”

  “Okay, tesoro.”

  “And that other book you brought me, The Seven Who Were Hanged, no more like that. I was thisclose to being the eighth by the time I’d finished it.”

  “But you asked me specifically to bring it for you!”

  “Don’t listen to me. The problem with it is built into the title. When you see a title like that, Gina, run the other way. The Russian angst is too depressing for a man in a cell. Everything is terrible and everyone is about to die. And then they do die. What’s wrong with those Russians and their entire line of literature?”

  “How about Chekhov?”

  Harry is tepid toward Chekhov. “He is so tubercular. I never know when he’s finished. Everything I read by him, it could all end a hundred pages earlier or a hundred later, I have no way of telling. It’s like breathing.”

  “How about I bring you some Sherlock Holmes next week?”

  “Yes,” he says, brightening. “Excellent. Stay away from the melancholics. Hardy, Gide. All the Russians.”

  She looks down into her satchel.

  “What did you bring me this week?”

  “I brought you Love Among the Chickens.”

  He laughs. “I like it already,” he says, taking Wodehouse from her hands. His fingers linger on hers.

  “What about Oscar Wilde? The Soul of Man Under Socialism?” She smiles.

  “You’re teasing, right? Very good. But no, thank you. I’ve had quite enough of his anarchic blather, his and his mentor Kropotkin’s. Nothing pleases them—”

  “Well, Kropotkin is Russian.”

  “The least of his problems. They contradict themselves constantly. They make me pine for curfew, and we can’t have that. What else?” He waits eagerly.

  “Look—I sewed a new layette for one of Mimoo’s housecleaning ladies who’s having a baby, and with the money I made, I bought you three books you can actually keep.”

  He stands up with excitement, looking over the partition.

  “Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons,” she says, handing the books over. “Don Quixote. It’ll take you your full sentence to finish that one. And Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”

  He slumps back down. “I’ve read them all,” he says. “Several times.”

  “They were on sale and available, and it’s what I could afford.”

  He sighs. Minutes pass. His head tilts to stare at her as a lover might stare before a kiss.

  “What are you up to this week?”

  Gina opens her mouth to tell him about Ben, then closes it. Harry is chatty, more or less friendly, relaxed. His gray eyes look blue today and she knows they change color depending on his mood. Today his mood is easy. She can say many things to ruin it. Mentioning Ben would be one of those things.

  “Is Salvo really back home?”

  “Temporarily.” She is glad for the diversion. “Until you come back.”

  “You smile as if it’s a joke, but you and I know you’re not joking.”

  “I’m not joking,” agrees Gina, trying to suppress her smile.

  When he quietly chuckles, she is so happy, and glad she hasn’t mentioned Ben.

  “So how is it out there?”

  “The leaves are changing. It’s like you love it.”

  “Yes. I do love the New England autumn.”

  They clear their throats. “Purdy says you should be out in a month or two. Definitely by Christmas.”

  He can barely look at her when he says, “So far away.” His blinking eyes are deep with remorse. “I’m sorry I’m in here again,” he says. “I’ve really done it this time, haven’t I?”

  She says nothing.

  “I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I thought I was exercising my First Amendment rights. Voicing my disapproval. What’s more American than dissent?”

  She wavers.

  “How did I know,” he continues, “that it’s against the law to flaunt your free speech by blocking entrances to army recruitment stations? Who made that cretinous law?”

  She keeps quiet.

  “Even that would’ve been okay if I weren’t on probation.”

  To that she has something to say. “You were already on probation when you went to Paterson. You should’ve never gone.”

  “Bill was paying me,” Harry says, immediately less nice. “We talked about this. What did you want me to do?”

  “Not go.” She is also less nice. “Get another job. Tell him to stuff it. I could think of about five minutes worth of things I would have told him had he asked me.” She pauses. “Hasn’t he done enough to hurt us?”

  They don’t even glance at each other when she says this.

  “Okay, okay.” His tone softens. “Clearly I need to find other employment when I’m back outside.”

  That part is a fact. One of the conditions of his release that the district attorney and Purdy have been going back and forth on is that Harry will not be allowed to come within a quarter mile of Big Bill Haywood or the IWW. Harry has been resistant, not because he wants to work for Big Bill, but because he doesn’t want the government telling him where he can and can’t work. No matter how many times Gina mentions it’s only temporary, Harry doesn’t care and doesn’t want to hear it.

  They change the subject. They always do. They have to. They have only two hours a week together and Gina will be damned before she ruins it with lectures and nagging. She has a lot going on in her life, but Harry only has these two hours. No point making him feel worse, when all he’s got is his own thoughts and her words until the following Sunday.

  “Anything special you want me to get for you next week?” she asks.

  He thinks. “Maybe you can bring me some pumpkin pie.”

  “Some what?”

  “Pumpkin pie. It’s the season for pumpkins.”

  They don’t have pumpkins in Italy. Gina’s never had a pumpkin or made a pie out of it. She smiles. “Sure, mio amore,” she says. “Anything you want. Next time I come I’ll bring you pumpkin pie.”

  “Bring one for Roy, too,” he tells her. “The other week when you brought biscotti, he raved to everyone how good they were. And he let m
e keep my light on an hour past curfew because he knows I like to read in bed.”

  “Okay, tesoro. I’ll bring one for Roy, too. He’s a nice man. He likes me.”

  “A little too much if you ask me.”

  She wants to touch him to reassure him, hold his hand, press his head to hers. Other things.

  “Do you know,” Harry says, “when I was, I don’t know, eleven, twelve maybe, my father took my sister and me to a pumpkin farm, and we brought these great big pumpkins home and carved them.”

  “Why would you do this?”

  “Carve pumpkins? I don’t know. The inside of the pumpkin is what you make the pie with. It’s messy, though. You’d like it.” He inhales. “It’s messy, just like your tomatoes.”

  They can barely speak after that or look at each other. Short of breath, he can’t go on with his story. Somehow he does.

  “After we removed the flesh from inside and carved the pumpkins, Esther decided she wanted to give me a fright, play a practical joke on me. So she cut one pumpkin in half, and placed it on top of our huge black tomcat sleeping on the grass, covering him as if he were in a clamshell and leaving him holes for eyes. We were sitting in our backyard that night, and through the eyeholes, the tomcat sees a squirrel and takes off like a horse, with the pumpkin still on top of him.” He laughs as he recalls it. “It was dark, and I wasn’t expecting it, everything had been so quiet, and this giant pumpkin just up and gallops across the yard, a pumpkin running after a squirrel. I must have screamed for five minutes, it was so startling and unexpected.”

  Gina laughs.

  Harry leans back. “I don’t think I ever heard my sister and my father laugh harder. My father actually cried. I had never seen that. Before or since. And then he kissed my sister and said, ‘You’ve outdone yourself, Esther. Well played.’ ” Harry shrugged. “Since he never praised her for anything, she nearly cried herself. We kept trying to do it again, stage a prank that would make him laugh. But . . .” he trails off. “You know.”

  Gina leans closer to the partition, her heart opening, squeezing shut.

  “You said you were only eleven or twelve?”

  “Yes.”

  “So your mother was still alive? Where was she?”