Bellagrand: A Novel

by Simons, Paullina

  “No!” said Esther and Rosa.

  “Now listen to me.” Harry banged the table for emphasis. “I have done a lot of things that have made my wife unhappy. I’m fortunate that she places a certain gravitas on the institution of marriage. Calls it a sacrament or something. But this conspiracy to deceive, I think it’s grounds for divorce, even in Sicily.”

  “She will lose her baby!” Esther said. “Is that what you want?”

  “God! When did you become so Italian? A little restraint, please.” He stood up and walked out.

  One evening the three of them had come back into the kitchen after hotly discussing Gina outside only to find her on the telephone. She was speaking in Italian, and they couldn’t understand a word. Watching her carefully, Harry sat and listened to her cry softly and exclaim loudly. After she hung up, she sat by them at the table.

  “Why are you all staring at me like that?” she asked.

  “Gina, dear, who was that you were talking to?” asked Esther in her most casual voice.

  “Esther, why are you clutching the table? To my brother, why?”

  Loud gasps of relief. Then they told her.

  She gaped at them. “Is this what’s been going on the last few days?”

  They nodded. Gina rolled her eyes. “Harry, I warned you molasses was trouble, and you didn’t believe me.”

  “I believe you now.”

  “You should have told me right away. I would have found him in five minutes and spared you the panic, you nervous Nellies.”

  “Where was he?”

  Gina told them that Salvo had gone out on the town with a woman from Back Bay the night before the explosion. He was still with her the following morning, and was too hungover to go to work.

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Harry. “Salvo’s wanton ways saved his life. I really can’t fathom the lesson one is supposed to learn from that.”

  “First, stay away from molasses,” said Gina. “And second, I keep telling my brother that women are going to be either his salvation or his undoing.” She smiled.

  Harry smiled too. “And what does he say in reply? Why can’t they be both?”

  “Exactly.”

  Everyone relaxed. The tension left the kitchen.

  “But how did you find him?” Esther asked. “I had Clarence driving around for days looking everywhere.”

  Smiling, Gina patted Esther’s hand. “He’s my brother,” she said. “I know where to look for him. Wouldn’t you know where to look for your brother?”

  “In prison?”

  “You’re correct, Esther,” Harry returned, happily easing into the paper he could read out in the open for the first time in days. “That’s where I am.”

  “Stop,” said Gina, pinching Harry and sidling closer to him. “Unfortunately Salvo is now out of a job.”

  For a moment they were silent, blinking at each other. “Is your silence fraught with meaning?” Harry shrugged. “So ask him to come down here.” He patted her hand. “I don’t mind.”

  “I asked him,” Gina said. “Apparently he still minds.”

  “So I get credit for offering without actually having to do anything? Perfect.”

  “Harry,” Esther said, “call him yourself. Don’t have Gina do your dirty work. Don’t be so inflexible. It’s time to let bygones be bygones.”

  “Inflexible?” said Harry. “Bygones? Am I the one who refuses to come down here where it’s safe, even though I barely escaped death by treacle?”

  “Harry is right for once, Esther,” Gina said, pinching him again. “Salvo is a mule. He has the nerve to tell me it’s not safe here. He says we have hurricanes.”

  “It’s called rain and wind.” Harry returned to his Palm Beach Gazette. “How many serious hurricanes have there been in the last ten years? None. And how many molasses disasters in Boston? I rest my case.”

  Four

  RIGHT AFTER THEY LEARNED that Salvo was alive and well, Esther packed up and apologetically announced she had decided to go back to Boston. “I don’t feel right leaving Father for this long,” she said to them on the last evening before she left. Supper was long finished and put away, Rosa had gone upstairs, and it was just the three of them in the very late evening on the stone patio. The fire had almost gone out, the wine was almost gone. It was time for everyone to head upstairs, the train was leaving at dawn the following day. Yet they sat and lingered.

  The night was quiet, muggy, warm. The air smelled deeply of salt water.

  “What if Father had been down in the North End?” Esther asked. “He goes there frequently during the week. He still keeps an eye on the properties he’s retained. He could’ve been there.”

  “But tell me, Esther,” said Harry, “what could you have done about it if he were? Carried him in your arms across Salem Street?”

  Esther put her arm around her brother, kissing him on the head. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I promise I’ll be back when the baby is born. I know you’re going to miss me.” She smiled. “But you have your wife. And Father has no one.”

  Gina poured Esther and Harry the last of the wine. They raised their glasses. After they languished for a few more quiet minutes, Gina took what she saw as the last opportunity to ask the brother and sister about some of the unspeakable things. She was afraid that once Esther left, she would never find out.

  “So tell me,” she began haltingly, “why did Henry Flagler build this house for your mother?”

  Harry glanced at his sister. “You want to take that one, Esther?”

  “Not really,” Esther said.

  When they didn’t elaborate, Gina prodded further. “Did he love her?”

  “How would we know?”

  “Perhaps he did,” said Harry. “You said so yourself, Gia.”

  “Yes. This house is a labor of love. Un travaglio d’amore.”

  “There you go.”

  “Was he married when he built it?”

  Esther and Harry looked at each other, wine in their hands.

  “Was he married?” Esther asked. “Yes. No? Perhaps he was married. He might’ve been between wife number two and wife number three. Or wife number three and wife number four. Or not. We don’t know how he had time to build Bellagrand when he was busy building the five-hundred-forty-room Ponce De Leon Hotel in St. Augustine during the same period. Perhaps that’s why it took so long,” she added. “Years. He was busy doing other things.”

  “We don’t know if he was married,” Harry added, “but you know who definitely was married? Our mother. To our father.”

  Gina crossed herself. Harry and Esther didn’t comment on it this time, looking as if they might want to make a sign of the cross themselves. “Yes,” she said. “I see how that might be awkward. But did your mother know Flagler was building it for her? Or did he build it and present it?”

  “Oh, she knew,” said Harry.

  “She helped him build it, we think,” Esther said. “She was down here often.”

  “Esther is being polite,” Harry said. “She must have moved down here. Because we barely saw her. When I was eleven or twelve, I don’t think I saw her once in six months.”

  “You were away in boarding school,” Esther said. “I saw her.”

  “You were also away in boarding school.”

  “Yes, but I saw her. I didn’t not see her for six months, is what I mean. You’re exaggerating.”

  “Maybe. It seemed a long time between mother sightings is what I mean.”

  “It takes a while even now to get from here to Boston by train. Back then it was easily a week each way. It was a difficult trip to make on your own.”

  “Yes,” Harry said. “And Mother hardly made it. She stayed here.”

  Watching him, Gina was thoughtful. “How did she explain it to your father?” she asked. “Being gone for months at a time?”

  “She was just gone.”

  “Harry, you’re not being fair,” said Esther. “She wasn’t gone.”

&nbs
p; “No?”

  “There’s gone and there is gone.” Esther’s voice was barely audible.

  Harry put down his glass. “Gia, we went sideways and I forgot your question. Oh, yes. How did she explain? I’d like to say that she probably didn’t have to. Father was so busy with his work he might not have noticed she’d gone missing.”

  “Harry!”

  “Do I jest?”

  “Don’t listen, Gina. Of course Father noticed. And she told her children where she was. She told us she was working on something special for us in Florida.” Esther waved her hand to the darkened house. “A new summer home. Initially she and Father traveled down here together to look at investment properties. Mother stayed by the sea, while Father worked. So at first her absence seemed stamped with Father’s approval.”

  “Yes,” said Harry, “but soon Father stopped coming down here, and Mother stayed on.”

  “How long did this go on?” Gina swallowed. “Her, um, staying on?”

  Esther and Harry sat. “A few years, right, Esther?”

  “At least.” Esther looked into her empty wineglass, turned it upside down.

  “The cheap truth of it,” Harry said, “is that Esther and I didn’t know anything.”

  Esther shook her head. “You were too young. I felt something wasn’t quite . . . in order. I kept asking Father, and he kept repeating that Mother was being delayed. That’s how he put it.”

  “That’s what they called it at the end of the last century,” said Harry. “Delayed.”

  “And then one day she was back,” said Esther. “Just like that.”

  “After being gone almost an entire year,” added Harry. “We asked her if the place was ready for us, and she said there were problems, and she had to give up on it.”

  “Yes, but then she took us to Cape Cod,” said Esther. “Do you remember?”

  “I remember,” Harry said. “We went clamming on the beach at Truro.”

  “Yes.”

  “I never heard the word Florida spoken again,” Harry said. “Not until Father came to see me in Concord.”

  “Me neither,” said Esther. “Harry, can you believe he took her back?”

  Harry’s hands clenched. Gina’s heart constricted.

  “Once,” Harry said, “I had found it unfathomable.”

  He didn’t look at Gina, or at his sister. Gina hurried on before Esther thought too long or hard about it. “How many years was this before her death?”

  There was no color in the exotic orchids, no sighting of the swallows, or sunset in the sky. There were no fishermen or rum-runners, no conch shells, shanty roofs, mangrove woods. There was just darkness, a flickering candle on the table, and the pungent smell of brackish water. A deepening night with dull lights across the bay.

  “Six months,” Esther finally replied.

  “Was it that long?” said Harry. “Seemed shorter.”

  “The beach at Truro was in August. She died in December.”

  “Like I said. Barely a season between.”

  Gina inhaled and waited, the sadness inside her multiplying. She counted out the times the nightingale sang, the times the crickets chirped. Esther sat like a stoic, pin-straight like a gravestone, staring at the abyss of the water, and Harry was sloping forward, elbows on his knees, eyes to the ground. Gina squeezed together her intertwined fingers. Minutes passed. “How did she die?”

  It was Harry who answered her. “She drowned in the Mystic River.”

  Dio mio, abbi pietà. Gina crossed herself, mouthed inaudibly in Italian. “Drowned . . . accidentally?”

  “Yes, why not?” Harry said, not glancing up.

  “Yes,” Esther echoed. “If you overlook the concrete slab tied in a sack around her neck.”

  “Or the notes she left for you and me around ours.” He straightened out and put his arm around Esther. She tilted sideways, to him.

  “I’m sorry, Harry,” said Gina. “I’m sorry, Esther.” They didn’t speak. “How did your father manage?”

  Esther shrugged. The shawl had slipped off her shoulder. “Who knows? He never refers to her unless he absolutely has to and never by name. I sometimes mention her in passing when we talk about other people or other events in our life, but we don’t discuss it.”

  Gina didn’t understand. That wasn’t how things were done in her family. Everything was agonized over. But it occurred to her that to render judgment on the father was to judge the son as well, for she and Harry had been married nearly fourteen years and this was the first time she was hearing about the death of Frances Barrington.

  “Harry never talks about his mother either,” Gina said.

  “Is it any wonder?” said Esther.

  “What’s there to talk about?” said Harry. “The less said, the better.” He nudged his sister. “You and I used to talk about her sometimes.”

  “Yes,” Esther said. “Before you wiped your life clean of your family, we would occasionally talk about our mother.”

  “Father told me not to come back, so I listened. I was an obedient son.” Harry’s arm remained steadfast around Esther. “Do you remember who couldn’t shut up about Mother? Louis.”

  “Oh my, yes.” Esther rubbed her eyes. “Until he went deaf, he continued to go on and on about her.”

  “What did he keep repeating?” Harry fixed his sister’s shawl and squeezed her to him. “He would say, your mother’s heart went done and broke.”

  “And who can go on living when your heart’s done and broke?” Esther finished for Harry.

  Gina slumped in her seat. Her eyes searched the faces of her husband and his sister. The fire had long gone out, and it was nearly dark except for a single candle flame, melting the last of the wax onto the plate on the table.

  “Did she leave anything behind for you, Esther?”

  A single tear ran down Esther’s face. Harry drew her closer to him. “Nothing but gloom for my sister.” He took a breath. “A chest of ornaments and charms. And a quote from Job.”

  The candlelight flared in a brief squall, and was out.

  Esther spoke, her voice like wet, loose gravel. “Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?”

  Five

  THE BIG HOUSE WITH all its noises was so strangely quiet after the two clucking, fussing women had left.

  The windows were open, the French doors flung wide to the great lawn. Gina lay in the hammock under the palms. There was no breeze, the palm fronds motionless above her head. She brought with her a book about babies, but drifted off as soon as her eyes touched the words on the page.

  Oh, the illusion of romance in a white house built on such desperate desire. It seemed so real. She opened her eyes to search for him.

  Harry was near the waterline and the lilies. It was hot and he was shirtless. He was tanned, his ash hair bleached by the sun. He looked almost blond. He shaved only on Mondays to impress Margaret Janke; the rest of the week he sported a porcupine stubble he tickled Gina with. His gray eyes looked blue in the hazy ceaseless Florida sunshine. He was cleaning the boat, getting the hooks and the fishing lines ready. He was always outdoors, digging, hammering. He built a table for himself so he could sit and read at it. Gina couldn’t believe her eyes. He had built a table! And not just any table, but a round pedestal table with a carved-out base and a mosaic top. It was intricate and stunning. Why are you so surprised? he had said, casual as all that. Do you think all I do is read and make love to my wife?

  That is all you do, she replied.

  She gave him nectar for the starved honeybees every afternoon, between the swimming and the sleeping.

  But when she lay in the hammock like this and watched him, often she would cry. Could what she had learned about him explain away his initial reluctance to having children, or was that too facile? Every once in a while she would find him staring at her swollen body with uncharacteristic anxiety, with dull disquiet, and she would wonder if he perceived her differently now that she
was about to become a mother. Did Harry define mother as someone who could abandon her children on a whim of the heart? She bought their baby silk rompers and yellow pajamas. She painted pink flowers on the walls of the baby’s nursery, sewed little bonnets and napkins and swaddling clothes. She vowed to redefine motherhood for Harry into the thing it really was, the divine thing.

  They put gasoline in the white boat he himself had named Frances and with Fernando’s full approval took it out onto the Intracoastal Waterway, traveled downstream to Lake Worth, anchored it in a small estuary by the hanging palms, pretended to fish, had a picnic lunch, and purred about names for their baby. Gina suggested naming the girl like the boat. Harry balked so loudly, the herons flew away. He wouldn’t consider it. She wouldn’t consider a boy’s name. She was convinced they were having a girl. “I have a girl feeling,” she said.

  Under the myrtle in the delta of the tidal woodlands, they decided on Grace, for how else to explain what was happening to them?

  Gina brought bags of white and yellow purchases home to a perplexed Harry. “How can one tiny baby require such a department store of a wardrobe?” he would ask. “I have three shirts. Why does he need twenty?”

  “She,” Gina would correct him, the floral extravaganza of silk and pink cotton on full display.

  “You know, dear wife, my enormous beauty queen, my wise and undulating princess, there is a slight possibility, a chance, however remote, that this child might be a masculine child.”

  “No chance,” said a panting Fernando, who had carried Gina’s purchases upstairs to the master bedroom. “In Cuba we are very good at predicting. We have a gift. Your señora is definitely having a girl.”

  “All right, well, if the oracle from Cuba proclaims it so, please, continue to buy pink bibs.”

  Emilio and Carmela were put on reduced schedules, because Gina wanted to gestate and hibernate with Harry in privacy, but the groundskeeper continued to work overtime mowing the back acre of their green, salt-tolerant wide-blade Seashore Paspalum grass that sloped into the water.

  Margaret Janke disapproved when she saw the man sweating outside one Monday morning. She said Harry should be mowing the lawn himself, like his wife, who cleaned the house, sewed dresses, and made shrimp in garlic sauce over pappardelle.