Bellagrand: A Novel

by Simons, Paullina

  “If it keeps rising in value, we could.” She would rather do that than sell. Or the worst: sell and move.

  “Rising in value? One of these days remind me to give you my lecture about capitalism.” Harry gestured to the waiter for the bill. “Nothing in it goes up without eventually crashing down.”

  Gina pulled herself up from the table. “That’s not what you said to Esther in the beginning when she told you there was an end to everything.”

  Harry took her by the elbow. “Gia, who knew, but my sister was right. There is an end to everything.”

  They paid and left in silence.

  Three

  A DAY TICKED BY. And then another.

  “Don’t you love it here?” They were in their bed late at night, both fragile and naked.

  He shrugged, his tone conciliatory. “I like it here. I like it because you like it. But you like it more than I do. I don’t like the hot sun as much as you. I don’t enjoy the beach as you do. I will never think of Jupiter as home. I’m not a country boy. And Alexander is not one either. Even if he is, I don’t want him to be one. I want him to grow up to be cosmopolitan and suave.”

  “Like you?”

  He squeezed her. “Yes, father wants son to grow up to be like him. Stop the presses.”

  “As your father wanted you to be like him?”

  He breathed in deeply before speaking. “Gia, what does Florida have to do with who we are? What is Alexander going to grow up as? There is nothing for him to do here. For him or for me,” he added.

  “Flagler found something to do. He changed the world here.”

  “By building a few houses?”

  “Why are you being derisive? Yes, like your father in Boston, by building a few houses, like this one, and then a railroad, and St. Augustine, and Palm Beach, and Miami. By spending the last ten years of his life building an impossible bridge to Key West, a bridge that spans nearly a hundred and fifty miles over water, to make it the closest U.S. port to the Panama Canal.”

  Harry visibly tensed. She regretted ticking off Flagler’s list of accomplishments starting and ending with the worst. But why did he have to be so dismissive?

  “Well, the railroad and the canal are already built,” Harry said. “Nothing more for me to do on that score. But I’m not just talking about me.” His arms were off her body. He lay in his corner of the bed. She lay in hers. “I’m talking about our son, Gia. What is he going to do in Florida? All he does is build dwellings for frogs and birds and gators. All he does is fish and swim, and run around the tennis court. I know it seems fun now, when he is little. But what kind of life is that for him in the long run? Alexander is too good for Florida. You know it. He can be anything he wants.”

  “Clearly you haven’t asked your son what he wants to be.”

  He turned his head to stare at her with blank incredulity. “Have I asked a three-year-old what he wants to be when he grows up? Um, no, we haven’t had that particular father and son talk yet.”

  “You should go ahead and ask him. Because he is all set.”

  Harry crept over and hugged her, as if she had told the funniest joke. “Gina! This place is a dead end for a smart boy like him. He can grow up to be mayor. Governor. President. Everyone who meets him—much to my irritation, I admit—sees what a remarkable child he is. Don’t thwart your son’s essential nature. Let him grow up in a place where his greatest talents, his greatest potential will be realized.”

  Gina tried not to cry. “There is nothing but beauty here.”

  “Those who visit Attica think there’s beauty in it also. But I’ve been in exile.”

  I don’t want to sell the house, Gina kept repeating like a poem, like an omen.

  But we must, he kept repeating, if we’re to have the kind of life we want.

  “I don’t want another life. Only this one.”

  “Is that true?”

  Yes, her heart cried, while her lips stayed silent. “To live your life facing away from the truth is to live out your life in hell.”

  “The truth isn’t in Bellagrand!”

  “It is.”

  “Where’s my sophisticated Simmons girl?” Harry whispered in the dark. “The young girl of velvet and chignon is now a woman in full bloom. Don’t you want to wear white gloves while strolling on Beacon Street?”

  “Instead of a sundress on Fiesta Avenue?” She paused, changed tactics. “What would your mother want? She left you this house. What do you think her wish would be?”

  “Who can say?”

  “You can say. Read again the note from her you have by your bedside. Such a house that may he never forget the romance of youth.”

  “By virtue of her rejection of her one and only life, she denied herself the right to have a say about anything.”

  The next morning Harry called Alexander back as he and Gina strolled down the beach, arm in arm, all three of them barefoot so they could wade in the surf. “Son,” said Harry, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “A builder,” the boy replied. “Like Gampa.”

  Gina kicked through the foamy water without comment.

  “That’s it, a builder?” said Harry. “Nothing else? You don’t have a choice number two?”

  “If I can’t be a builder, a soldier.”

  “A soldier!” Harry tried to catch Gina’s eye, but she was having none of it. “Why a soldier, son?”

  Alexander kept trying to run off into the tidal current. “Dad, let go. I don’t know why. So I can carry a gun? I don’t know, Dad. I. Just. Don’t. Know.”

  “You put him up to this,” Harry said, catching up to her and pushing her into the waves.

  “As if that boy is remotely susceptible to being put up to anything.”

  Gina remained baldly unpersuaded. Harry worked on her. He went into town with Alexander, bought her a white hat. He took her out on their boat, dropped anchor, and spoon-fed her half melted ice cream. He soothed her with stories of the bright and clement future, soothed her with fine words and long kisses. Soothed her with his languorous kisses most of all. He really upped his game.

  Gina retreated into Bellagrand and into herself—watching Alexander play with his frogs and crabs while she navigated her own murky koi ponds. What was best for her dancing boxer boy? She wasn’t sure it was Boston. But she also wasn’t sure it wasn’t Boston.

  Harry was convinced a busy city was the answer. “Every day he could play soccer on the Common,” he kept saying. “He could learn how to play hockey, like me. Perhaps he could learn to ice-skate—like you?”

  Gina steadfastly ignored him.

  “He would learn independence,” Harry continued. “He would go to the best schools. He would go to Harvard, like every Barrington before him. Perhaps I could be his professor, if things go the way I plan. What a wealth of experience, what a rounded childhood. You can’t think only of yourself, Gina. You have to think of Alexander.”

  “What in the world do you mean? He’s almost all I think about. I still don’t want to sell the house.”

  “Treat it as the one sacrifice you must make,” Harry said to her on another long afternoon over their too-strong sangria. There was rum in it, and fruit, and sugar, and wine. Soon all talk would cease, and other discourses would begin. For now they languished with sangria coursing through their blood.

  “I don’t want to sell the house.”

  “We’ll get another vacation home, closer to Boston. We’ll get a place on Cape Cod, as my sister recently did.” He smiled, grabbing her, lifting her out of her chair, pretending he was going to dance with her on their veranda with the dim sailboats in the dusky distance.

  “The water in Cape Cod is cold,” Gina said, unmoved, though touched. “It’s not here.” Nothing was like here.

  Round and round they waltzed around Bellagrand. Dance with me, come with me, leave with me, sell with me . . . He cajoled and ministered while she meandered through glutinous mud.

  “For thirty years the house
rose in value,” Gina said. “Value that you told your father, may he rest in peace, was arbitrary. Doesn’t seem quite so arbitrary now, does it? If we keep the house, it will continue to grow in value. But if we sell it, what will we do in Boston when the money runs out?”

  “If we sell it, the money will never run out.” Harry assured her. “But we can’t keep one house here and another in Boston. We can’t keep running two large households. That’s profligate. My way we’re set for life, angel. We sell, we take the money, we put it in the bank and live off the interest. My way, no more mills, sewing machines, cleaning other people’s houses. Your way, we continue to owe the bank money instead, paying for two homes instead of one. Your way, we are broke in ten years. My way, never.”

  “Live off the interest” was all Gina said in response. “A fine way for a former communist to speak.”

  Harry blinked, and fell quiet while he regrouped. But he couldn’t quite circle around to a rolling wagon of command-economy persuasion. All he had was the rickety carriage of the free market.

  “In Boston,” he said, going a step further, a leap deeper, “if we’re by some outside chance running low, I easily can get other work. In fact I’m counting on it. I’ll have my doctorate. I intend to teach again. But what am I going to do here?”

  When Gina said nothing, he took it as an opening. “I mean, just think about it. If we stay, what am I going to do? You heard Janke. Man without work has no meaning. And there is no work here for a man like me. Please. Just think about it from my point of view. My solution has everything going for it. Alexander, me, you, Esther. It has something in it for all of us. Your way has something in it only for you.”

  Your way has everything in it except Bellagrand. Did she say it to Harry or plead it to God?

  “You can’t have your feet in two states, in two lives,” Harry said. “Bellagrand will buy you your Boston life. You will finally be the thing you once dreamed of, Harold Barrington’s society wife. Everybody will call you Jane Barrington.”

  “And God won’t know who I am, if I change my name.” Gina’s voice was faint.

  “You already changed your name, my Simmons college girl. Long before me.”

  She didn’t want to tell him she had changed it only for him. There was no profit in those confessions now.

  Gina wavered. Gina swayed. He caught her swooning, and romanced her, and said things and did things to weaken her resolve, to dissipate her fear.

  He kept appealing to the fundamental passion in her, to her most elemental longing of how to remake herself from a povera contadina to a lady of the manor. It was seductive, the way he spoke of it, to live on Beacon Hill. A woman of means with an adorable, perfectly mannered child, a handsome, old-moneyed husband, shiny patent shoes and alligator bags, made from other alligators, of course, not her son’s.

  She could have lunch with her fancy girlfriends at the Harvard Club, and on the weekends throw lavish parties and charity events, just like Alice once used to. She could be a patron of a church, or a park. She could walk Alexander to school and back, holding his hand on Charles Street. She could go dancing and shopping, buy the finest makeup and the latest flouncy skirts. Women’s fashion had become so light, so appealing, so sensual. Who wouldn’t be seduced by that, who wouldn’t be swayed?

  Gina played the ivory keys as she ambled through her house, trying to remember Schumann’s melancholy Traumerei. She sat at the piano and imagined leaving it all, giving it up, this material permanent thing with walls and windows, bartering it for a few unseen shekels in the bank. But the shekels would mean Beacon Hill and Harvard and fancy friends. It would mean restaurants, and opera, and society balls. She lay down on the glossy walnut floor. Once a house, but soon just invisible money behind a bank vault with a wheel for a lock. Now: grass, ocean, frogs, palms, a boat. Life. Soon: Boston, trains, noise, Alexander playing soccer. Also life . . .

  There was romance in both, a desire for both. But the absence of one filled her womb with numb dread, as she imagined herself without this house in her future, without this view, or the sandy barefoot walk on the beach in the early mornings when the dolphins dived near the shore, deepest serenity, Fernando and his Spanish strings plucking “Rosario de mi Madre,” while she sat outside in the night, sipping Bellinis and appletinis. Esta será la última cita de los dos . . . this will be the last time for us both.

  Even that part was already behind her. Esther wasn’t returning, nor Rosa. Herman was gone. Salvo, busier than ever, was never here. They had just lived it, and already it was receding into the rosy dimness before her eyes.

  Gina wandered through the cavernous rooms and remembered going to one of Emma Goldman’s lectures, back in 1908. Harry had long stopped going with her. She had gone with Angela. Emma’s talk was called “What I Believe.” In it she spoke about property. “Property is not only a hindrance to human well-being,” she had said, “but an obstacle, a deadly barrier, to all progress. Property condemns millions of people to be mere nonentities, living corpses, machines of flesh and blood, who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a gray, dull, and wretched existence for themselves.”

  Am I that other? Gina wondered as she wandered, touching her plaster walls, her marble sinks, her blackwood doors. The windows were open and the salty breeze so fine in the late afternoon. She hadn’t thought of Emma and her property rights in years. Emma Goldman had been deported to Russia on the Buford two years earlier. How did the anarchist and the communists get along on the Soviet Ark? She bet Harry would know. She wanted to ask him, but she didn’t care. Now, recalling her idol while standing in the middle of Bellagrand, Gina felt that Emma Goldman was wrong. Their existence wasn’t dank upheaval. It was shining grace.

  What did Harry feel as he advocated selling? Did keeping Bellagrand mean to him that he was selling out his deepest principles? Gina was afraid of his answer.

  “Gina, you have to decide what you want,” Harry said. “We can’t just keep riding the ocean waves and eating ceviche.”

  “You and I want different things,” she said in a pinched voice.

  “But we don’t! You want the urban swell, too. You’ve always wanted it. And you’re still the same girl I married, the same impetuous, wild, smart, full-of-life girl. Come on, Gia,” he whispered into her neck, into her heart, between her breasts. “Don’t you want to be young again, flamboyant, bedazzling? Don’t you want to be yourself?”

  The broken voice of Frances Barrington faded, whispering not crying about the romance of youth, and her own father’s voice faded, too, admonishing her to never forget where she came from. Gina shut her heart to the dread, denied the ghost of premonitory terror within her, and agreed to move back to Boston.

  Four

  BEFORE SHE COULD CHANGE her mind, Harry called Salvo and asked him to put the house on the market. Gina told Harry she would give it two months. If it didn’t sell in two months, she would know it wasn’t supposed to leave their hands.

  Bellagrand sold in a span of one post-lunch lull. Salvo brought the man in a suit at the hazy hour of three when everyone else was having a siesta. The man, Jon Turner, said he had a wife, but didn’t consult her. After a tour of the house, he didn’t even haggle. Salvo asked a price; Turner agreed to pay it before he walked down the front steps to the naked Aphrodite.

  Gina balked. They sold too low, she said. That’s why it went so quickly.

  Harry disagreed. “We asked a fair price. My father had estimated this house to be worth a hundred thousand dollars. We were just offered double that.”

  “That’s my point,” she said. “In three years it has doubled in price. In three more years, it’ll be worth half a million.”

  “We’re not going to be here to see it. What if the housing market plummets? We won’t be here to see that either.”

  Salvo smirked. “Harry, how often you say the zaniest things. This area is the most lucrative property market in the United States.” He and Alexander were sucking the juice
out of their oranges by holding the wedges to their lips and racing to see who could do it the fastest. They were making a big mess in the kitchen.

  “Yes, yes,” Harry said impatiently. “It’s good now, a seller’s market. It won’t last.”

  “The market is very stable,” said Salvo, mouth full of pulp.

  “If by stable you mean volatile, Salvo, then yes,” Harry said. “If we’re forced to sell later, in a buyer’s market, we’ll lose money instead of make money. How is that smart?”

  “My question is, is it smart to sell now?” asked Gina.

  “Very, very stupid,” said Trevor Jenkins, the Tequesta National Bank manager, who stood at their front door not two mornings later, admiring the blackwood. The bank manager was making a house call. Gina was impressed.

  “You’re Mr. Jenkins? Nice to finally meet you.”

  “What do you mean, Mrs. Barrington? We’ve met. You come into my bank twice a week. You signed the deed in my office.”

  “Of course.” Gina had no recollection of him. “Won’t you come in? Would you like some lemonade? I made it fresh this morning. We grow our own lemons.”

  Harry strode into the Great Hall and shook Jenkins’s hand. “Mr. Jenkins, come try my fresh-squeezed orange juice instead.” He smiled. “I should go into business for myself, it’s that good. Right, Gia?”

  “Right, Harry.” A little slower, she followed both men into the kitchen, where Salvo was on the floor with Alexander, who was building an impossibly tall wall of wooden blocks, a termite building a mound a hundred times its own size. He had to get up on the table to finish the top of it.

  “Salvo, get the boy off the table,” said Harry, getting down a glass. “What do you think of our home, Mr. Jenkins?”

  In Salvo’s arms, Alexander was adding the last of the blocks to his tall tower.

  Jenkins loudly fawned over the spaciousness, the light colors of the white and limestone kitchen, the lawn, even over Alexander.

  “Tell him the child doesn’t come with the house,” Gina whispered to Harry as he poured the orange juice for the bank manager. Jenkins drank and then buttered up Harry over the orange juice.