Bellagrand: A Novel

by Simons, Paullina

  He hoped this man’s uncle had a better story.

  “What do you and your dad do together, Alexander? You don’t play war . . .”

  “No. He takes me places.”

  “What kind of places? Parks?”

  “Yes, sometimes. We kick the soccer ball around. He throws a baseball with me. We joined a father–son softball team. But it’s only in spring. He took me to a Bruins hockey game last week. I really liked that. He’s been taking me with him everywhere. Mom is strict sometimes. Dad doesn’t care when I go to bed or what I have for breakfast.” Alexander chuckled. “Sometimes I hardly have breakfast at all, and he doesn’t make any fuss about it.”

  “I’m sure,” said Esther, with a disgruntled headshake. “Where else has he been taking you?”

  “I don’t know. Around Boston. We hand out pieces of paper. And sometimes he talks to people, almost shouts.”

  “What pieces of paper, Alexander?” said Esther. “What people? Your father doesn’t shout.”

  “I call it shouting. He says he talks about things he believes in. Something about workers. Maybe money.”

  “These pieces of paper . . .”

  “Workers of the World Unite,” Alexander said. “Or something like that.”

  He couldn’t miss the frowns that ghosted across the adult faces.

  “Oh, and the other day, the police came!” Alexander said, ready to let out the things he had been keeping inside. “They told the people listening to Dad to go away, and then they told Dad to go away. But we didn’t, so they said they would arrest him if he didn’t go away in five seconds, and he said, my son is with me, and they said they would arrest me too!” Alexander looked like he felt—deeply let down. “Dad and I left, but he didn’t want to.” He paused, watching the silent exchange between the adults. “Aunty Esther? What’s arrest?”

  “When the police tell you to do something, you have to do it, or they put handcuffs on you and take you to the police station where they accuse you of committing a crime.”

  “But Dad was just talking.”

  “Do you do anything else with your father besides getting almost arrested?” Ben asked.

  Alexander laughed. “Last year he and Mama taught me how to ice-skate right here on Frog Pond—”

  “Oh, look,” Ben interrupted, walking ahead. “Here we are.”

  How strange adults are, Alexander thought. Why ask a question if you don’t want to hear the answer? He clutched his revolver tightly just in case he had said something upsetting, and this nice man decided to take his presents back.

  The three of them stood silently in front of a dark bronze relief of a man on a horse, with foot soldiers around him.

  “Is that your uncle?”

  “That’s my uncle. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.”

  “Do you see him much?”

  “He died before I was born, Alexander,” Ben said. “But he was a great man. I would’ve liked to have known him.”

  “I would like to know my Zio Salvo,” said Alexander. “But I don’t think he is a soldier.”

  “No,” said Esther. “But your uncle is the best singer I’ve ever heard. He is funny. And all the girls adore him.” She kissed Alexander on the head and whispered, “As they will you, someday.”

  “Ugh! Aunty Esther . . .” An embarrassed Alexander moved away from his aunt toward Ben. The three of them stared at the monument. “Why is your uncle great, Mr. Shaw?”

  “Because he was a real hero.”

  “Really?” Alexander paid attention. “What did he do?”

  “He led a platoon of Negro men to battle against the Confederate army,” said Ben. “His was the only platoon of Negroes in the entire North. No one wanted to lead them. But my uncle did. They fought and ate and slept side by side in Virginia and North Carolina. No one else would do that. But my uncle did. When other commanders asked him how he could do that, he said because he knew with absolute certainty that all his soldiers were better men than he was because they were braver. He was convinced, he said, that God would prefer his foot soldiers over him.”

  Alexander shook his head. “God doesn’t play favorites like Mr. Duncan, does he?” Mr. Duncan was Alexander’s grammar teacher, and did not care for Alexander at all.

  “My uncle thought God did.”

  They ambled around the monument while Ben continued to talk.

  “In 1897, a couple of years before your mother came to America, this monument was unveiled. Your father and I stood where you stand right now for its dedication. We were not yet twenty. William James said of my uncle that he was a blue-eyed child of fortune, upon whose happy youth every divinity had smiled.” Ben smiled himself. He took Alexander’s hand, the one that wasn’t holding the revolver, and squeezed it. “In that way, he was a little bit like you, wasn’t he?”

  Alexander was perplexed. Why did this man who seemed so familiar with Esther, so casual with her, not at all full of restrictive manners, look down on him, a boy he barely knew, with such fondness, and why would he say things that made no sense? “I don’t have blue eyes,” Alexander said. He pointed at one of his caramel-colored eyes. “See?”

  “I was being figurative. As William James was. I don’t think my uncle had blue eyes either.”

  Alexander tried not to frown. Why were adults so hard to understand? Why couldn’t they just say what they meant? “Was he old?”

  “He was twenty-five,” Ben replied. “Is that old?”

  Alexander nodded. “Very.”

  Smiling lightly, Ben continued. “He and his men were defending Fort Wagner in South Carolina. But they were outnumbered and outgunned.”

  “They had guns? Like this one?” Alexander cradled his trophy.

  “Yes. Except they were real. And bigger.”

  “What kind of guns?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Muskets probably. Rifles. Cannons.”

  “A cannon is not a gun.”

  “You’re right. They had lots of weapons and were using them all.”

  “I like weapons . . .” Alexander said dreamily. “Tell me about the battle.”

  “He led the charge, but was killed—”

  “How?”

  “He was shot.”

  “Soon after starting?”

  “Very soon. I told you, they were vastly outnumbered.”

  Alexander was disappointed. He wanted the battle to last longer. Like Gettysburg. That one lasted three terrible days.

  “After hand-to-hand fighting, his infantry men were killed, too.”

  “Hand to hand?”

  “With knives, like yours. With bayonets.”

  “How many?”

  “How many what?”

  “How many soldiers died?”

  “Everybody, Alexander,” said Ben. “Everybody died.”

  “Oh,” said Alexander, lowering his head. That wasn’t very good. “Like the Alamo.”

  “Yes. Like the Alamo. Which is why I thought you might enjoy the Lone Star revolver. The Confederate general in charge of the opposing army was so angry that my uncle was leading a charge against the South with black men, he refused to return my uncle’s body to my grandparents, and instead had him buried in a common grave with the fallen Negroes.”

  Alexander was surprised. “So he isn’t buried here?”

  “No, it’s just a monument.”

  The boy whistled. “Your grandfather must have been mad.”

  “On the contrary,” Ben said. “My grandfather said that his son could have no greater honor than to be buried with his men, ‘no holier place’ in which to lie.”

  Alexander clapped his gun into his palm. This was a much better story than the Philip Nolan one. “That must have really upset the Confederate general. What was his name?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Wasn’t it General Hagood, Ben?” Esther cut in.

  “How do you know that, Est?”

  She shrugged. “You may have told me once. Or I read it.”

  A
lexander placed his warm palm on the cool monument. “General Habad is more like it,” he said.

  Ben laughed. “Indeed, Alexander. Indeed.”

  After they dropped Ben and the books off at his mother’s, Alexander was quiet on the short drive to Barrington, clutching his revolver and hunting knife, looking out the window.

  Esther broke the silence. “What did you think?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of my friend Ben.”

  “He was nice,” Alexander said. “He was very nice to bring me gifts. I like his uncle.”

  When Alexander told his father about the afternoon with Ben, Harry showed little interest in the story of Ben and Esther and Robert Gould Shaw. But later that evening Alexander overheard him on the telephone talking sharply to Aunty Esther about weapons and colonels and the evils of war. After that Alexander didn’t see Aunty Esther’s friend again, though he would ask and ask and ask to spend another afternoon with him, to hear more of his war stories. Perhaps he could ask his mother to intercede on his behalf when she returned home. He couldn’t wait to tell her about Battery Wagner.

  Chapter 17

  PRINZ VALDEMAR

  One

  PRACTICALLY NO DANGER of summer storms,” the brochures had proclaimed since 1912, luring tourists and residents to South Florida. Everyone believed it. No one had been evacuated leading up to the storm they were now calling the Great Miami Hurricane. True, the National Weather Bureau had issued a warning for a severe storm off the Caribbean, but the warning fell not so much on deaf ears as uncomprehending ones. The brochures clearly stated in bold print there was practically no danger of summer storms.

  So on September 17, 1926, everyone remained in their homes. On September 18, there were hardly any homes left. Fifty thousand people homeless, four hundred people dead. Thousands missing, Gina’s brother included.

  The seventy-mile-an-hour winds came with the rain in the dead of night, but by sunrise Miami stood largely intact. At dawn the relieved Miamians poured into the streets and onto the bridges to see the mighty ocean swell. You see? they collectively said. Look how calm it is. It came and went. We were right. There was noise, but hardly any danger.

  What they didn’t know was that they were standing in the hurricane’s very eye. Forty minutes later, the rear of the eye wall hit Miami. The winds swirled to a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. The ocean rose fifteen feet in a surge. The mayor later said of Miami Beach that his barrier island town, separated from the mainland by a narrow causeway, was on all four sides “isolated in a sea of raving white water.”

  The property destruction was stupefying. “Madam, everyone and everything in Miami Beach washed out to sea” was how one sailor put it when Gina stood at the dry docks that had been mutilated by high winds. Along the length of Collins Avenue, the grandiose hotels and fancy vacation homes appeared to sit two or three stories closer to the ground. The sandy beach had washed into every grand marble lobby. There was no electricity, and the only running water was from the ocean tides. The abandoned hotels were being used as hospitals.

  “But my brother wasn’t in Miami Beach,” Gina said to the sailor with hope. “He had gone to Coral Gables.”

  The sailor took off his hat and crossed himself. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “But Coral Gables was landfall.”

  It took her a long time to find a taxi to take her down to Coral Gables to file a missing persons report, to search for Salvo amid the ruins. In the Bay of Biscayne, an enormous ship, nearly two hundred and fifty feet long, lay on its side, blocking entry in and out of Miami Harbor.

  “That’s from the hurricane?” Gina asked one of the marine workers.

  “No,” he said. “That’s Prinz Valdemar. Ten months ago, in January, it was sailing into the harbor to become a floating hotel for the tourists, when it tipped and sank in the harbor, blocking all trade by sea.”

  “Why did it sink?”

  “No one knows. It’s a mystery.”

  “Was there a hurricane?”

  “I told you, there was nothing. Just a ship, suddenly on its side, like a blockade of our city. We were planning to tow it to a nearby marina when this storm hit.”

  “Now what are you going to do with it?”

  “No one knows. Who cares?”

  Gina found a room at a small hotel inland. She stayed a week, talking to the police and the sailors and the salvage crews, every day looking through the rolls of the missing, walking the ruined streets in hopes of catching a glimpse of Salvo, a word of Salvo.

  Finally she called Fernando, who drove down to Miami to meet her and take her to Tequesta. Fernando had stopped coloring his hair and was now completely gray. He looked beaten up, too, troubled, shaken. There was barely a smile for her, as they embraced, both of them trying not to cry. He moved slowly and with effort. By the uncommon grimness of his demeanor, Gina reckoned the old Cuban was making peace with the worst.

  Not she!

  The only small talk they managed was when he first opened the car door for her and glanced at her frame in its short-sleeved cotton flapper dress. “You have gotten so thin, my señora. I’ve never seen you like this. You are not sick, are you? Do they not feed you up in Boston?”

  In the car they spoke of the devastation. “We weren’t as badly hit as Miami,” Fernando told her. “Still, I was hurt, as you can see. I’m still hurt. I thought it was terrible for us. But now that I’ve seen Miami . . .” He trailed off. “We were barely touched by comparison.”

  Yet in Tequesta the palm fronds were on the ground, the fences, the houses.

  Salvo’s bank account had not been touched. Jenkins, as weaselly and sweaty as before, told Gina there had been no withdrawals, no deposits, no checks cashed since September 16, 1926, the day before the day before the hurricane. Aside from the lack of activity, Gina was startled, though she tried not to show it, by how little money remained in Salvo’s name. The real estate market had been booming all the years he was a sales agent, yet the commissions didn’t make it into his savings account. When she mentioned this to Jenkins in the most nonconfrontational of terms (what was she afraid of? that Jenkins embezzled from her brother?), the man smirked. “Mr. Attaviano may not be savings-rich, Mrs. Barrington, but he was life-rich. Tremendously so. Your brother spent his money as fast as he could earn it, God bless him. And he earned quite a lot. He spent quite a lot. He drove a very expensive Duesenberg.”

  That Gina knew. Just days earlier, the recovery crews had found Salvo’s luxury fire-engine-red Model A sunk in the waters off Key Biscayne, dredged it from a canal near Coral Gables. Salvo wasn’t in it.

  “Yes, he lived well, Mrs. Barrington. Have you been to his home?”

  Gina had indeed been to his home. Fernando had taken her there first. Salvo had built himself a beautiful white hacienda with a red-tile roof on the Tequesta side of Hobe Sound, practically overlooking Bellagrand. Not much remained of his home. The tile roof had been blown off and lay like brick lava all around the yard. The house stood empty, like a shell from which the clam had fled. The windows had been blown out, the doors torn off, the porch was in splinters. Debris and garbage were spread all over the grass front yard. The fence was gone. Gina couldn’t breathe, that panic rising again, as she surveyed the damage.

  Fernando asked if she wanted to drive across the bridge to see Bellagrand. He was certain it hadn’t been badly damaged. He had seen the gate from the road, still in one piece, and he wanted her to be sure, to be comforted. Gina looked at him as if he were offering her a trip into the portals of Hades.

  “Why would I go there, Fernando? Why would I torment myself? Don’t you know it would bring me nothing but heartache?”

  She turned her back to the well-meaning Cuban so he wouldn’t see her cry. But the smell of the ocean, the demolished houses, the absence of her brother, became too much for her. She broke down. She wished she hadn’t come.

  Salvo: a goat shepherd, a lumberjack, a rag collector, a street sweeper, a bread-maker, a s
inger, a seller, a lover, living in a custom-built Spanish revival house, driving a flame-red Duesenberg and wearing silk suits. I’m going to Miami, mia sorella Gia, he had crooned to her in a cheerful singsong on the telephone the day before the day the eye wall came. There is a girl in Coral Gables . . . it sounds like a song, doesn’t it? A girl in Coral Gables, I’m going to drive down, take her out to dinner, buy her pretty flowers, go dancing on the town. Her name is Stella. A bellissima name. A bellissima girl. Tonight I’ll be hers and she’ll be mine. Stella.

  Salvo, melted into air, into thin air. Doubled over, Gina wiped the tears from her face.

  Fernando helplessly stood patting her curved and hollow back.

  After a few futile weeks in Miami, Gina returned to the National Bank to check on Salvo’s account. There had been nothing taken, nothing added. Before she left she asked Jenkins how much her old home was currently worth.

  Jenkins hemmed and hawed. He told her there had been too much inventory before the hurricane. There was also a traffic jam on the railroads and a subsequent embargo by many companies that couldn’t move their products into the region. Unreasonably bad press didn’t help matters. The prices had been driven down.

  “But won’t they go up now?” Gina asked. “There seem to be so few intact properties left.” She swallowed. She didn’t mention Bellagrand by name.

  “One would hope home values will indeed go up, Mrs. Barrington. But you know, we have been at a historic high—”

  She interrupted him. She didn’t want to know about then. She wanted to know about now.

  “Your old home?” Jenkins leafed through his catalog of inventory. Or pretended to leaf. “I should think that if the new owners were determined sellers and it was priced correctly, I could find a firm buyer within three months for . . .” He mulled over a figure. “Fifty thousand dollars.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, yes. At least.”

  “Did you say fifty thousand?”