Bellagrand: A Novel

by Simons, Paullina

  The Boston judge slapped Domarind with contempt of court and denied the motion to dismiss. Domarind took Harry’s case to the District Appeals Court, and then to the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Massachusetts. The Supreme Court was next, and Domarind was fired up like a kiln. But the Federal Court overturned the original conviction, backing away from sedition and stipulating that just because Harry was on probation did not mean that his First Amendment rights could be trampled on.

  Gina breathed a momentary sigh of relief.

  Seven

  THEY STOPPED RECEIVING INVITATIONS to dinner and to social events like weddings and engagements. How short-lived her white-gloved existence had been, Gina thought, as she walked Alexander to Park Street School every morning.

  The lunches with Meredith became sporadic and then stopped altogether. Meredith cited other obligations and duties, but during one such cancelled afternoon when Gina was walking down Beacon Street, she saw Meredith sitting outside a cafe, drinking tea with another Beacon Hill matron, and laughing. Gina walked by with her head raised, smiling as if she were the one having fun.

  When she told Harry about it, he laughed. Good riddance, he said. Who needs them? I never liked them.

  Their weekends were open, their Saturday nights free.

  And then one morning, as Gina was walking up Beacon Street after dropping off Alexander, she saw two female acquaintances coming toward her, still some distance away, chatting with each other, and watched dumbfounded as they, without breaking their stride, crossed the street to avoid the discomfort of acknowledging or even passing her.

  “You imagined it,” Harry said. “You are blowing it out of all proportion.”

  It happened again and again. It happened with casual ease and across all spectrums: young and old, rich and working class, men and women—all ostracized her. At Alexander’s school, the other mothers stopped speaking to her. Oh, they nodded when she said hello, some even smiled, and then they hurried along as if they were so very busy or they had remembered a vital thing they had to attend to at that precise moment. It was as if she wore a scarlet letter on her chest, or maybe four. W of C. Wife of a Communist.

  You’re imagining it, Harry said. Don’t be paranoid.

  She devised a test. For a month she did not speak to anyone at Alexander’s school. And in that time no one initiated a conversation with her, not even about the Boston weather.

  Alexander was no longer invited to other children’s houses; there were no more birthday parties, First Communions, cookie-making afternoons, no more games in the park. In May 1928, when she sent out twelve invitations for his ninth birthday, all twelve came back with regrets. So they took Alexander and his friends from Barrington, Teddy and Belinda, camping in the White Mountains instead. They had a great time. And Harry remained unperturbed. “Did you want to be friends with them?”

  “I wanted to be friends with someone,” said Gina. She missed the social gatherings, her evenings dancing, the charity fundraisers, the hospital functions.

  Harry looked at her disapprovingly when she continued to complain. “Have all our desires truly become so empty of meaning?”

  Was Gina imagining it, or were Harry’s crowds dwindling, too?

  Ben was right. Harry was a gifted orator, a fine rhetorical speaker, but he was losing his crowds. The system must be fundamentally rebuilt, he insisted. Okay, but most people didn’t want that, not even in the park on Saturday. So he got out of Boston: to Medford, Gloucester, Lexington, Arlington Heights. Gina and Alexander went with him, hoping to spare him arrest. For some reason his unsoftened rhetoric provoked the police less if his stylish wife and engaging child were by his side.

  Soon the out-of-town crowds, too, lost their enthusiasm. Was it any wonder? Harry would tell his audience they had to suffer before they had what they needed. But he couldn’t answer their shouted questions about how long the suffering would last.

  “You’re alienating your audience,” Gina told him after one especially unsuccessful outing. Just his audience, right?

  “I don’t care,” he said. “I know it’s hard hearing what I have to say. They’ll come around.”

  Gina bit her tongue. “Alexander! Off the swings. I know it’s hard hearing what I have to say. But the bus is waiting.”

  “The good times will end,” Harry shouted in another homily on a Saturday morning on the Common in Watertown. “And then what? Yes, it’s good now. But it won’t be good like this always. Look at Miami. Do you see what happened there? That’s going to happen everywhere. What are you going to do when the money is gone? Where will you turn? Who will help you?”

  “It’s a cycle,” someone yelled back. Someone always yelled back. “Your way, the good times will end for good.”

  “No economic boom can last forever,” Harry roared. “If history taught us anything, it’s that.”

  “Your way, we’ll never have an economic boom again.”

  “Not true. It’s the end of injustice! The end of economic slavery! The end of war! You will reap the benefits of your hard work. You won’t go hungry.”

  “I won’t be free either.” The heckler wouldn’t stop.

  “What would you rather have, bread or freedom?”

  “Man cannot live by bread alone!” someone else shouted out, a woman. They were joining in now, emboldened. Gina stood on tiptoe, to spot the woman who had said that. It almost sounded like her own voice, like something she might say.

  Harry paused for an answer. “What will you do when the bread is gone?” he yelled.

  “Throw yourself off the rock you stand on,” the woman shouted back. “Show us how the state will help you then.”

  “I can throw myself off the rock till Kingdom come,” Harry said, “but you’ll still be out of work with no one to turn to. Who can you count on when all the jobs leave this city? You’ll have no one to turn to but yourselves. Is that the kind of country you want to live in? That’s not the America I believe in!”

  “To the sewers,” a man shouted, clearly with some rhetorical powers of his own, “and you’ll take millions down with you! Your way we will live under the sword. Who wants that?”

  “You’ll have bread!”

  “We’d rather be dead than live under the sword. We’d rather starve.”

  Hear, hear, the restive crowd murmured. Hear, hear.

  He wasn’t getting through to them.

  “Harry,” Gina said on the bus back home, her arms around a sleeping Alexander, “do you know why you’re not getting through?” She wished she could sleep anywhere, like her peaceful boy.

  “They’re not ready to receive my message,” he said wearily.

  “No. Because yours are totalitarian dreams. That’s not the model for America. This isn’t the country for it.” To soften her words, she added, “Perhaps another country. Perhaps Russia.”

  “Yes!” he exclaimed, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him before she said it that summer evening on public transit.

  “I’m being ironic,” Gina said, brow furrowing. “How is the Soviet Union being held together? They’ve been decimated by their civil war. They pulled out of the Great War only to lose millions on their own soil. Russia is coming apart. How long will it be held together by the sword?”

  “However long it takes.”

  “Oh, Harry,” said Gina, so disappointed. “Even your utopian dreams have become Mussolini-like in their execution.”

  “Which is to say what?”

  “You’re fascist even in your daydreams, Harry.”

  “You understand nothing, Gina.” He rubbed his perspiring face.

  “Perhaps you can explain it better in Roxbury next Saturday. Because the people don’t seem to understand you either.” She nuzzled Alexander’s head and turned to the window.

  “What hope is there, if I’m not getting through even to my own wife?”

  Pointed silence was her only answer. He changed the subject. “Where have I heard the phrase Man does not li
ve by bread alone?” he asked. “They keep shouting it at me during my orations, and I have no response. I feel like I need to have one.”

  Benevolently Gina smiled. “There’s so much you don’t know. And you don’t even know you don’t know it. You want a proper reply to that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Next time you say: that’s right, man doesn’t live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

  Harry groaned. “Oh no. It’s from the Bible?”

  “From Christ’s forty days in the desert. From His chat with the devil about miracles and why He refused to perform them.”

  “How is that possible? Everything I say you turn against me.”

  “Shout back,” continued Gina, mild as the weather, “that Christ is the bread of life. Cristo è il pane della vita.”

  “Oh dear God. Stop it.”

  She stopped.

  “The hopes that inspire communism,” Harry said, “are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount.”

  “So tell that to your people, Harry,” said Gina. “Don’t hold back. Begin with that next week in Roxbury before you ease into the suffering.”

  Eight

  ON A FRIDAY MORNING in late September 1929, Gina picked up the telephone receiver to call Esther to find out if she was fetching Alexander from home or from school and discovered that the line was dead.

  She didn’t know what to do. Why would the telephone be broken? She sifted through the papers in Harry’s desk to find the address of the telephone company, but couldn’t find any of their bills. She looked for the checkbook, but couldn’t find that either.

  Harry had already gone out; she no longer asked where, because she didn’t want to know, and he no longer told her, because he said he wanted to protect her from knowing. Alexander was in school. Gina had nothing but time. She had planned to go to St. Vincent’s. Instead she put on her coat and hat and went to the bank.

  Afterward she might have stumbled in the opposite direction from home, toward the water, the docks, the ships, distant lands, somewhere far.

  Somewhere else.

  Anywhere else.

  She was Miami, a once tropical paradise, isolated in a sea of raving white water. The railroads jammed and embargoed on the left, the Prinz Valdemar lying beached and sunk in her harbor on the right, precluding the arrival of rebuilding materials and any departure of battered tourists. No way out, by rail or by sea. Just Gina, Alexander, and Harry, bankrupt and trapped with the unquenchable, indestructible Mediterranean fruit fly.

  Chapter 18

  WHITE TERRORISTS ASK FOR MERCY

  One

  SHE WAS HUNCHED OVER on the floor in the kitchen, her head in her hands. Harry was standing over her trying to explain what he couldn’t explain, like on a Saturday in Roxbury.

  “There’s less money than I’d hoped there would be.”

  “When you say less, you mean no money. Right? Because that’s what there is. Nothing.”

  “Not nothing.”

  “Nothing.”

  There was nothing to say.

  “Where is it?”

  “What?”

  “Where is our money?”

  “Where do you think? We spent it.”

  “On what?”

  “On living. You don’t have shoes? You don’t have dresses? I don’t have books?”

  “That’s all we have,” she said. “And I don’t have many dresses or shoes anymore. Three years ago I donated most of them to St. Vincent’s on consignment. Where is our money?”

  “Boston is expensive. Now do you see why I wanted to move from the Mt. Vernon house? It drained our resources. We never should’ve lived there. We should’ve rented a smaller place from the start.”

  She couldn’t look at him. What was she going to do when Alexander came out of his room for dinner? No dinner and his mother on the floor. For the sake of her son, she had to get herself together. “We lived like kings and queens in Jupiter,” she said, struggling to her feet, refusing his proffered hand. “We wanted for nothing. We ran a real house, not a hovel you rented us on Mt. Vernon. We had servants. We paid a rum-runner to smuggle all the liquor out of Cuba into our cellars. We had two cars. We had a boat. We spent barely twenty thousand dollars on that blissful, astonishing life.”

  “I thought it was more,” he said.

  “No. We came to Boston with enough for forty years of fine living. I know what we came here with. And you’re telling me that seven years later we don’t have enough to pay the June telephone bill? In September?”

  “I know.” He was sheepish. “I can’t believe how fast the money has gone. I almost wish you were still taking care of it, like you did in Lawrence, and at Bellagrand. It was so much easier.”

  “Easier!”

  “Yes. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Because I don’t know who you are,” she said. “I don’t know who I sleep next to every night.”

  “Please don’t wring your hands like that. You’re going to break something. You’re scaring me.”

  “I’m scaring you? Dio mio!” she cried. “Dio mio! Is there nothing left to be exalted?” To despair was a sin, but Gina couldn’t help it—she was losing all hope.

  “My struggle against inequality is left.”

  “There is no more money left for your inequality!”

  “There’s always some somewhere.”

  Gina shook her head.

  “Don’t worry about the rent, I told you. And Esther will take care of Alexander.”

  Gina didn’t dare lift her eyes lest Harry see the boiling scorn in them. “How dismissive you are of her money,” she said, “and yet how sure of it. You rely on it the instant you reject it. You do understand that someone out there must make money so you can be a communist.”

  “Who would that be? My sister? She wants for nothing. She hasn’t worked a day in her life.”

  “Your sister,” Gina said, “spends her days volunteering at hospitals around Boston and raising money for the poor, for charitable food pantries and clothes bins. She and Rosa take dinner to the local home for the terminally ill every Sunday. She spends hours reading to people who are about to die. The only privilege your son has comes through her largesse. His bikes, his hockey skates, his shoes, clothes, books, his private school all come from her.” Gina couldn’t get far enough from him. The ten plagues had well and truly descended on Egypt if she was now defending Esther to Harry.

  “I don’t want another material thing.”

  “It’s always wise, Harry, not to want what you don’t have.”

  “Don’t be flippant, Gina. Why can’t you trust me? It’ll turn out all right. It always works out, and this will, too.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But it will. I promise you. It’ll work out.”

  “Where is it? Where is our money?”

  “I don’t know where it is.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  He was silent.

  Gina wanted him to tell her, to not be afraid to say the words out loud. The helpful bank manager had already informed her of the sacks of cash that had been carried out in wheelbarrows for the bail bondsmen, the court fees, the penalties, the legal costs. Bribe money to pay off the police and the lowly assistants at the DA’s office, who would inexplicably lose files, evidence, names of material witnesses. Domarind. It all added up—and how. Oh, and let’s not forget the barrelfuls of dollars that went to the Boston offices of the Daily Worker and to the Workers Party.

  That’s where their money had gone. The communists had coined quite a profit from her misery.

  “It’s Domarind,” Harry said. “He’s a vulture. He’s a shyster. A thief. He overcharges me for every minute he spends on my case. Every time he goes to court to file a five-minute motion, it costs me a hundred dollars. He is merciless with his fees. He’s terrible. Who recommended him? We couldn’t have done worse if the person who referred him hated
me and wanted to cause me nothing but harm.”

  “What are you talking about? Domarind has kept you out of jail for three years.”

  “Is it my fault he overcharges me?”

  She stumbled back against the kitchen table, tripping over the sash of her beige housedress. She almost fell. She didn’t understand the words that came out of his mouth. It was as if she had reverted to the language of her childhood. Everything he said sounded like gibberish. Why, just now he had said something so irrational as to make her doubt she’d heard it right. For a moment Gina thought Harry said it wasn’t his fault that all the Bellagrand money had gone to his lawyer.

  Her face must have been a sight.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, with a conciliatory tilt of his head. “I admit, a little bit did go to the CPUSA. Membership dues, small contributions, donations to the Daily Worker. It’s an operational issue. Printing costs, ink, newsprint, distribution—they’re all expensive. It’s like the local parish, Gia. Didn’t your mother tithe at St. Mary’s? Don’t you tithe at St. Leonard’s? It’s all right for you to give to the Catholic Church, but not all right for me to give to the Communists?”

  She slammed her hands over her ears to stop herself from hearing him. For one agonized second she thought, if I throw myself from the window, I will stop hearing him forever.

  “What happens now?” she whispered. “The host has been bled dry. Now what?”

  “Bear with me a few more weeks. I’m working on a plan.”

  How far was it to the window?