Bellagrand: A Novel

by Simons, Paullina

  “All right, Mr. Jenkins,” Harry said. “Thank you. But now tell us—to what do we owe your unexpected visit?”

  Jenkins wiped his mouth. “May I speak freely?” He glanced at Alexander and glared at Salvo, who smiled widely and took a mocking bow.

  “Of course,” Harry said.

  “With all due respect, Mr. and Mrs. Barrington, I think Mr. Attaviano over there has advised you poorly. Very poorly. This is not the time to sell. Certainly not for what you’ve agreed to.” He stuck out his clammy hand to Gina, shook hers softly and moistly. “Mrs. Barrington, you are one of our best customers.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Jenkins,” said Gina.

  Harry smirked.

  “Yes, most certainly we would hate to lose your business to a Boston bank, but because of my own personal regard for your family, I’d like to give you a bit of invaluable advice, explain a few things. May I sit down?” He plonked himself down at the table near Alexander’s blocks. They rattled. Now it was Alexander’s turn to glare at the bank manager. Gina perched near him, but Harry continued to stand.

  “Salvo,” Harry said, picking up Alexander and handing him over. “Please, take Alexander swimming. I want to hear uninterrupted what Mr. Jenkins has to say. Don’t worry, son, we won’t touch your Egyptian pyramid. Now scoot.”

  “It’s going to be a sweltering day,” Jenkins said when the uncle and nephew had left. “You’re lucky, your boy can spend all day in the pool.” He smiled unctuously. “Won’t be able to do that in Boston, will he? Quite cold there last week. I read it in the papers. June 15 was fifty-two degrees and raining.”

  “Tell us what you’ve come here to tell us, Mr. Jenkins,” Harry said, formal, clipped, dressed in a sharp suit, Boston-sharp, not Bellagrand casual. “We don’t have all day. The Turners are waiting for an answer.”

  “I fervently advise for that answer to be no,” Jenkins said. “And I will tell you why.” He coughed. “You have vastly underpriced your house in current market conditions. Oh, I’m not saying that’s not what your house is worth. What I’m saying is, it’s not what your house and all the other houses on the coast from Miami to Daytona are valued at. The houses here are in extraordinary demand. You’re selling both too short and too soon.” Jenkins nodded, wiping his brow. “But I’m not advising you to sell slightly higher. Just the opposite. I’m advising you to wait.”

  Gina glanced up at Harry triumphantly, but her triumph disappeared into his closed face. For some reason he wasn’t buying what Jenkins was selling.

  “In 1919,” Jenkins told them, “a man bought undeveloped ocean frontage about fifteen miles south of here for a quarter an acre. That’s twenty-five cents an acre, sir and madam. He just sold it for over a million dollars. Did you not read about it? It was all over the papers.”

  “We must have missed it,” Harry said grimly.

  “From twenty-five cents in 1919 to a million dollars in 1922. A tiny Miami lot that was bought six years ago for twenty-five dollars just sold for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Have you not heard that the Miami Herald has become the heaviest newspaper in the world because of its real estate advertisements? You have one of the rarest lots in the area, a house with two water frontages, both of them private beachheads. You have over two acres of property, a well-built, modernized house. I guarantee you, guarantee you,” Jenkins repeated for emphasis, “your house will be worth five million dollars in two years’ time. At least.” He nodded into Gina’s astonished face. “And to prove to you how certain I am of the upward trajectory of your one-of-a-kind home, I have already dropped the rate on your line of credit from six percent to three, and I will also forgo all interest payments for the next twelve months. That’s right. I will also,” he quickly added, judging from Harry’s face that he wasn’t quite closing, “extend your equity line from its current outdated appraisal value, which is what Mr. Attaviano is trying to forfeit your house for, to eighty percent of what I know your house will be valued at by, say, 1925. I will give you three million dollars in credit right now, to use as your personal bank account. Oh, and Mrs. Barrington, just so your brother doesn’t suffer because I’m advising you not to sell your home, I will pay him his commission on the lost sale out of the bank’s regulatory fees.”

  Gina excitedly looked up at a silent Harry. Did she just hear Jenkins correctly? Did he just say . . .

  “So let me understand,” Harry said. “You will lend us—”

  “Against the value of your home, naturally.”

  “Naturally. You will lend us three million dollars, halve our interest rate, waive all interest payments for one year, and pay Salvo’s fat commission on a nonexistent sale out of your own end.” Harry made a skeptical but incredulous face. “Why would you do this?”

  “You are one of our finest customers,” repeated Jenkins. “I would like it to stay that way. Perhaps I forgot to mention,” he added, “but we’re in an unprecedented boom, Mr. Barrington.”

  “Did you say unsustainable?” said Harry, his voice dry.

  “No, no.” Jenkins slowed down his speech. “I said un-pre-ce-den-ted.”

  “Oh. Thank you for speaking slower.”

  “You’re welcome, sir. I will do anything to keep your business and to keep you from making a lifelong mistake. It’s your choice, of course.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Talk it over between yourselves. May I have a glass of your lemonade while I wait, madam? Your son looked to be enjoying it very much.”

  Harry grabbed for the lemonade pitcher. “We don’t need to talk it over, Mr. Jenkins,” he said, quickly pouring the bank manager a short glass.

  “We don’t?” said Gina.

  “The lemonade is wonderfully sweet, madam. Your son is right.” He smiled at Gina.

  “We don’t need to talk it over,” Harry said, “because we agreed to sell this house to Jon Turner. His offer is already extravagant. Your way, Mr. Jenkins, forgive me for saying so, is how people lose their life savings. By being greedy, by wanting more. Nothing is ever enough. Well, we don’t need more. The sale price is more than enough for us.”

  Gina raised her hands to stop him from speaking. “Harry . . . wait . . .”

  “Mr. Jenkins, you don’t have a crystal ball, do you?” Harry went on. “You can’t see the future? Because that would be quite a trick if you could. But you can’t promise me, can you, that the housing market won’t sustain a bust.” He downed a glass of his own orange juice. “You can’t sign your name to that piece of paper, can you? The point of the market, as you well know, is that it fluctuates. Well, just try to imagine our life, Mr. Jenkins,” Harry coolly continued, “if on the largesse you’ve extended us, my wife and I mortgage our new life in Boston. We buy a house, a boat or two, fine clothes, some automobiles. Maybe even a Rolls-Royce. Why not? We’ve got your three million dollars. We’re like my son in a candy store. And what happens if the market collapses and we are into your bank for a million, possibly even two? Where would we get the money from to repay you?”

  “Well, you would sell your home, of course, Mr. Barrington,” Jenkins said condescendingly.

  “Would I, Mr. Jenkins?” Now it was Harry’s turn to be condescending. “And what happens if I can’t sell my home? What if there are no buyers? What if what we owe you is more than what the house is worth? Have you considered that possibility?”

  Jenkins laughed. “There are people sleeping on the beaches, waiting for a house in this area to become available! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about a housing bust.”

  “Why would there be a housing bust?”

  Harry glanced interrogatively at the sullen and unwilling Gina.

  “What you’re saying makes no sense,” Jenkins continued. “I will admit the market sometimes corrects itself slightly. But it doesn’t fall off a cliff.”

  “I understand.” Harry shook his head. “It’s a risk my wife and I are simply not willing to take. Right, Gina?”
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  What could she say? Did she have a crystal ball? Could she see the future? Salvo impeccably dressed in silk! The house receiving an offer from the first buyer! Jenkins extending them a three-million-dollar line of credit, nearly the gross national product of Sicily. It didn’t seem, with what was in front of her, as if Harry could ever be right. And yet, living on borrowed money was anathema to her. Life was unpredictable. There was fear in her heart of everything.

  “You’re right, Harry,” Gina said, in an uncertain whisper.

  Harry extended his hand to the perspiring and perplexed bank manager. “Thank you so much for making the trip to see us, Mr. Jenkins. I’m sorry it was for nothing.” The three of them stared outside to the lawn where Alexander was showing Salvo how to catch a wading secretive bittern. “It’s true, the boy likes it here very much,” Harry said. “But he is a young boy, and soon he will start school. He needs a different life. This will be a great house for another family. I won’t keep you a moment longer.”

  After they showed an unhappy Jenkins out, they stood on the porch over the bleached stone drive and smelled the ocean air from across the road. Gina kept her mind deliberately blank and her face placid. Harry took her hand. He told her that in the spring, he used to stand on the front step of his house in Barrington and inhale the wind wafting in from the mighty Atlantic ten miles away. The briny easterly breezes foretold that summer was just around the corner.

  Five

  WE STAYED IN VALHALLA long enough, Gina quietly cried as she showed the movers how to pack and mark her crates and boxes. That’s how well off they had become. She didn’t pack her own things anymore. She hired men to do it for her.

  Anticipation of imminent change overcame other misgivings, like the night sweats she began having as they got closer to leaving. El Dorado was what she carried inside her, she said to calm herself down. Anywhere they went, as long as they went together, they would find their El Dorado again. She said that, yes, but she would wake up in the night, gasping, unable to go back to sleep. What is it? Harry would ask. What are you dreaming about? She couldn’t remember. She saw herself sitting in an empty room behind a table.

  “Well, that doesn’t sound very scary,” he purred to comfort her. “You sit behind a table three times a day when you eat. Who’s in the room with you?”

  “No one. Like I’m waiting for someone dreadful to arrive.”

  “Where am I? Where is Alexander?”

  “That’s the thing.” She would cry, her face in her hands. “I don’t know. I sit at this table, and I don’t know where anyone is. It feels as if everyone’s gone.”

  “And then what happens?”

  “What happens? I wake up. Like this.”

  “Why don’t you stay asleep a little longer so you can find out where you are? That way you won’t be afraid anymore.”

  “I can’t,” Gina said. “I feel such a black terror, I can’t.”

  He held her close, rubbed her back, kissed her hair, murmured to her. “Tables can be very scary, my love. I understand. Shh.”

  They packed up their things and sold their cars. Two taxis came to take them to the train. Fernando stayed composed as he held Alexander. “My little man, you’re going to do great in Boston. Are you kidding? You are going to have so much fun. Big cities are fun, mi amigo. You’ll see. You will love it like I love Miami. In the big city, everything happens at once.”

  On the train north, Harry took hold of Gina’s hand. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right.” She forced a smile.

  “Don’t you feel it’s the absolute right move?”

  Nodding, she pressed her lips into the back of Alexander’s head and stared out the window, with him on her lap, as the train gained speed, rolling between the two waters, palm trees gleaming, sun shining, people already on their boats, two boys flying a kite, the bromeliads, the cypress swamps, the American jungle frontier receding from view. Salvo had wept when they said goodbye the night before. She had asked him to sing, but he couldn’t, his voice kept breaking. She asked him to sing her favorite song from Tosca, “E Lucevan Le Stelle.” Usually he sang it to pierce the heart, his beautiful multioctave tenor carrying to Tequesta across the water, as if he himself were Tosca’s doomed lover. But not last night. He was out of pitch, up and down the whole song, and couldn’t finish when he got to svani per sempre. Vanished forever. Gina hadn’t seen her brother cry since Sicily, since their father died. She couldn’t think about it now as she held Alexander, who was banging very loudly on the window, trying to get the attention of the ladies in their boats below the moving train. Why had Salvo been upset? Was it because his adored nipote was leaving? Or was there an omen in his sorrow? Did he fear that he might never see his sister and her family again? He wouldn’t answer when she had asked him. You’ll come for Christmas, Salvo, she said, full of hollow assurances, and we’ll be back to visit, we’re just a few states up north, we’re not in another country.

  Like Russia.

  Like Panama.

  “I know you thought it was Shangri-la,” Harry said on the train, throwing his arm around her, kissing her, kissing Alexander. “Now Beacon Hill will replace it. Son, please, don’t bang so loud on the glass. The conductor says you’re going to break it. And the girls can’t hear you anyway.”

  Gina didn’t want to correct her American-bred husband; after all, he had graduated summa from Harvard, and she didn’t even graduate from lowly Simmons. So she didn’t mention that Shangri-la was an imaginary fantasia, a place that existed only in Mozart’s sheet music and in the mind of the heart. It wasn’t real. Whereas there was nothing imaginary about Bellagrand, except that now it was wholly in the past, and nothing made that clearer than the first-class compartment on a train that clanged its way north and away from what was and would never be again to things that weren’t yet but were about to be very soon. The train was the moment of dizzy suspension between two worlds. It was the ocean liner from Naples to Boston. It was the train from Boston to Lawrence. It was the train from Boston to Spanish City. How pretty it had looked to her years ago, before Alexander was born. How full of untapped promise. There had been a carnival on the outskirts, she had watched it from above, from her train window. She searched for it now, the Ferris wheel, the arcades. She remembered Alexander sitting on the carousel, on a white horse, clutching the reins and the pole, a toddler horseman, spinning around the circle of joy with the happy beat beat beat of the lilting music.

  How to bring up the Blaise Pascal quote Gina had found transcribed as the last entry in Harry’s open and disjointed journal, written out in his precise careful hand. She had read it while they were packing to go.

  Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death . . . Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

  Inspector Javert could not have been right, could she?

  Shangri-la.

  Are there carnivals in Boston, she asked him, her voice fading, like that of Frances Barrington, like that of Alessandro Attaviano.

  Every day, baby, Harry said, there will be a carnival.

  Part Three

  THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

  1922–1929

  The rain was pouring down,

  The moon was shining bright,

  And everything that you could see

  Was hidden out of sight.

  —Anonymous

  Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

  Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

  —Wordsworth

  Chapter 15

  ISADORA AND SERGEI

  One

  THEY RENTED A GRAND old brownstone on Mt. Vernon, the finest of all fine streets in Beacon Hill, just a few doors down from Henry C
abot Lodge’s house. The home they found was spacious, if a touch musty, but the kitchen was renovated, and the light-hued walls and rugs reflected electricity usage instead of coal, which made all things dank and dark with its by-product soot. The house had light. It wasn’t white, like the other house. Some of the walls between rooms had been knocked down, giving the illusion of space. Harry and Gina wanted to buy, but the owners weren’t selling. It had been his wife’s family homestead since the early 1800s, the weary husband explained. They weren’t living in it now because it was too cold for them in the winters, so they had moved to South Florida, of all places. They wanted a quiet respectable family to take care of their prized Beacon Hill property. The Barringtons, with a professorial, Boston Brahmin husband and only one child, seemed ideal.

  Harry told Gina not to worry. They would move in and take their time to look for the perfect house to buy.

  They had left Bellagrand in early August, during the muggiest of muggy weather, but in Boston things weren’t much cooler. Boston was airless and stifling, and, as Gina pointed out to a less than receptive Harry, the warmest of oceans was no longer twenty yards across the road.

  Esther’s reunion with Alexander was an extended tearful embrace. For as long as Salvo had cried saying goodbye, Esther now cried saying hello. “I’m so happy you’re here,” she kept saying to a delighted but confounded boy. She offered to take Alexander to her newly bought summer cottage in Truro, to give Harry and Gina a month to themselves—to look for a house, buy furniture, apply to Harvard, settle in, make friends, hire help, and all without worrying about what to do with a child in the city. Rosa and I will take him clamming, Esther said. The fishermen would love to show him how to do it. Alexander didn’t know what clamming was, but was thrilled nonetheless. Gina and Esther were formal with each other, as if they had just met.

  “Alexander, I was going to give you lunch,” Esther said, carrying him away to the nearby car with Clarence waiting, “but you are very heavy. What are they feeding you?”