Bellagrand: A Novel

by Simons, Paullina

“It’s my strongest desire. You know that. I’ve never wanted anything more in my life.”

  “Anything?”

  He caught her again, both hands on her waist, drawing her near, ignoring her horror-struck face. “You are my love, and my life. Have you been walking the streets for months, as I have? Have you recited the arguments for and against, as I have?”

  “For and against staying with you? Leaving you? Running screaming? Oh, yes, Harry. I have.”

  “Stop it,” he said, letting go of her, cooling down. “Stop being cruel to me when I’m trying hard to be loving.”

  “You should have told me about your secret desires,” she said. “Shared some of these musings with me. With me, Margaret Janke, Kenneth Femmer, your father, the parole board, the district attorney.”

  “Russia, Gina! Beyond the shadow of my name and my station. Where no one knows me, or us. Not like Boston, where you can’t walk down the block to buy a newspaper without some idiot judging you. In Russia, we can be like everybody else.”

  “Who is we?”

  “You, me. Alexander.”

  “You want Alexander to go to the Soviet Union?” Gina mock-laughed.

  “Why are you laughing? We can’t leave him here.”

  “We can’t?”

  That’s when he backed away from her. That’s when he lost his good humor. Finally.

  “Are you joking again? Because—”

  “Do I look to you like I’m joking?”

  “Gina! You want to leave our son in America while we move to the Soviet Union?”

  “I don’t want to move to the Soviet Union!”

  “But there’s a chance we will have to.” He paused. “A good chance.”

  “You just told me you know a man who can fix it.”

  “I lied! We can’t fix it, okay? They are going to deport us.”

  “What have you done?” She was shaking. “Not Alexander. They’re not going to deport him.”

  “Can you hear yourself right now?”

  “Are you hearing yourself? It’s the Soviet Union!”

  “It’s our son!”

  “I know!” she cried. “You should have thought of him on your streets of daydreams!”

  “I did think of him! It didn’t occur to me for a moment we would leave him.”

  “We can’t take him to Russia, Harry!”

  Harry’s mouth dropped open. His eyes drained of color. He stared at her uncomprehendingly. “You want to abandon Alexander?”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Then what did you say? Because that’s what I heard.”

  “I don’t want him to go to the Soviet Union,” she breathed out.

  “It’s because of him that I want us to go more than anything. Him, most of all. Do you want him to grow up soft like me? Do you want impossible expectations to suffocate him, too?”

  “You want him to go to the Soviet Union so no one will expect anything of him?” She laughed. Cackled.

  “In Russia,” Harry said, “Alexander won’t have anything to fall back on except himself. He will be forever free of my father’s name, and of my father’s money.”

  “You want that for him? To have nothing?”

  “Not nothing!” Harry yelled. “To have himself. That’s more important than power, or status, or wealth, or God. It’s more important than anything.”

  “If you want him to have nothing,” Gina said, “you’ve done a splendid job of making that happen here. Why would he need to go all the way to Russia?”

  “Because his parents are going.”

  “Get another lawyer, Harry,” she said, gasping again. “Save us. Stop us.”

  “Save us for what? We have no money. I can’t write a word for a newspaper without the DA practically threatening me with execution!”

  “So what? You weren’t making any money at your Red newspaper!”

  “We can’t live here anymore. And besides, here our son will always be a Barrington. Have you not walked down the street lately? It’s an abomination. I can’t get milk at the grocery store without nasty looks being thrown my way.”

  “Harry, please!” She folded her hands in prayer. “I have dragged Alexander with us everywhere, to bail you out, to stand by your side, to talk to your lawyers, to join you in court, to proclaim our solidarity. We have gone with you everywhere—but you can’t be serious about Russia.”

  “Since 1917,” he said, nodding. “And in Russia we will work for ourselves.”

  “We could have worked for ourselves in Spanish City,” she said. “We could have sold the books you love, grown oranges.”

  “In Russia we will change the way man thinks.”

  Gina would not allow herself to be cheated out of words as she was out of choices. She would use all the English at her disposal to prove to him he was mad.

  “Have you not read what Emma Goldman wrote after she came back from Russia?” she asked. “She published a scathing book about what’s going on there.”

  Harry dismissed it with a twirl of his hand. “First of all, they were fighting for survival when she was there. She was thrust into Russia during the civil war. That was unfortunate. It’s better now.”

  “She wrote there was no freedom.”

  “Is there freedom here?”

  “Yes! You’ve lived your whole life here and never worked,” Gina said. “You’ve stood in the park in the afternoon and shouted at the passersby about what a terrible country America is. You think you can do that in Russia?”

  “I wouldn’t want to do that in Russia. And we’re broke because I’m not free to say what I think, to do as I please.”

  “We’re broke because you haven’t worked and you’ve spent your mother’s money and your father’s money!”

  “You think you’re free? Gina, they’ve taken away one of your most fundamental rights—the right to drink what you like. Your freedom to imbibe spirits as a free woman has been snatched from you by the busybodies in Washington, because they decided you don’t have the right to your own body.”

  “It’s detestable. But it’s going to be repealed.”

  “Yes, but you do understand the concept of a man in a suit taking away from you power over your own life?”

  “Harry! Emma Goldman says in Russia the Communists have taken away everything! Yes, Prohibition is a great example of the corruption of the meaning of government. But in Russia that corrupted power is unchecked. There wouldn’t even be the possibility of a repeal. They’ve taken away the people’s right to get together with their friends, to print things, to make copies of the things they’ve printed, to disseminate them on the street corner the way Goldman had distributed Mother Earth. They’ve taken away the right to speak your mind in public. You’re no longer allowed to use Marx’s dialectical method to arrive at the truth.”

  “Because Lenin believed they had already arrived at it,” Harry said. “They were fighting a civil war. How many times do I have to say it? It’s better now. Where have you been reading this propaganda?”

  “Emma Goldman,” said Gina. “She is not in Russia anymore. She is writing her propaganda from Germany.”

  “So she was free to leave?”

  “It wasn’t so good that she stayed. Read her book, Harry.”

  “I don’t want to read her damn book! I’ve been reading all my life. I don’t want to read anymore. I want to go and do.”

  “Go and do in the Soviet Union?”

  “Yes! I want to live the way I want, my way. I want Alexander to learn to live his way.”

  “This isn’t about Alexander. Stop it. This is about you.”

  “And him. I want him to have a new consciousness. I want him to be a new man.”

  “Yes,” said Gina. “But will he be a free man? Will he be able to choose his own work, will he keep the product of that work for himself? I don’t care if he is a shoemaker or a poet, Harry, but what I do care about is this: will he live in bondage? Will he be a serf?”

  “Stop echoing the a
narchists, Gina. Think for yourself. This whole freedom thing, it’s so bourgeois. It’s how the Americans brainwash you—by making you believe it’s the greatest good.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No! Equality is the greatest good. Justice. Community.”

  Gina stared at him, baffled. She tried again. “Big Bill Haywood, your old employer and friend. Do you know where he is?”

  “In the Soviet Union.”

  “Well, no,” Gina said. “He is dead. What, you didn’t hear? Yes, he died last year. Probably right around the time you were renouncing your American citizenship—and mine. Drank himself to death in a tiny room in Moscow, utterly marginalized after Lenin’s death. He had been petitioning the U.S. since 1925 to allow him to return home.”

  Harry glared at her with open hostility. Gina welcomed it. At least now he reflected what she was feeling. They had stopped moving in their antagonistic pas de deux. “What’s your point?”

  “Begging them to let him come home!” she said. “But he had skipped out on a twenty-year sentence, so the Americans were not amenable to having him back.”

  “What’s—your—fucking—point!”

  “All your old colleagues who went to Russia are coming back with horror stories! That’s my point. Are you going to listen to them?”

  “No! We are going to forge our own story.”

  She was breathing hard, thinking hard. “They killed the tsar,” she said.

  “It’s supposition. No one knows for sure.”

  “They shot the tsar,” she repeated slower, as if he hadn’t heard her properly, “and his entire family. They shot them in the middle of the night, in a small room, smaller than this one, with machine guns.”

  “Conjecture. You don’t know.”

  “Harry Barrington, if that’s how the Bolsheviks treat royalty, what do you think is going to happen to you?”

  “Emma Goldman was fine. Big Bill was fine.”

  “She ran for Germany, and he drank himself to death! He spent his whole life advocating for radical change and after he saw what it looked like he killed himself!”

  “Right there, that’s how you know we’re going to be fine,” Harry said, a picture of fake calm. “Because I hate the Germans, and you don’t drink.”

  They backed away into their separate corners, to get their breath back between rounds. Shaking, she took a drink of water. He took off his suit jacket, his tie, unbuttoned his shirt. He was perspiring.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Harry asked her from his corner. “The Soviet Union is the one thing you’ve decided to become a skeptic about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your whole life you’ve judged everything through rose-colored glasses. The difficulties between us, Lawrence, your immigrant roots, your hardscrabble existence, my father, your brother. You’ve put a shine on it all. For thirty years you’ve lulled me with your peachy vision. But right here is where you draw the line?”

  Gina didn’t know what to say. Was he right? No, he wasn’t. He wasn’t right. “Yes. This is where I draw the line. I should have drawn it at Bellagrand. Live and learn. Everybody has to draw it somewhere, and this is where I draw mine.”

  “You mean draw it exactly between what I want and what you want.”

  Her fists stiffened, her jaw stiffened. “What do you mean?” she asked quietly, trying to keep the Sicilian in, though inside her, the volcano was spitting steam. “All I’ve done is walk the line behind you in everything.”

  “Not this.”

  “In everything else.”

  “You most certainly have not.”

  She stepped out from her corner, around the couch, walked closer to him. Took long strides toward him.

  “You wanted to read, become smart, find your way?” she said, mocking him. “You didn’t want to work for penny wages? So I did. I was used to it, I reasoned. You already gave up so much. No point in your giving up the things you love most—reading and dreaming. I gave you that!”

  “If you really wanted that for me, you would have let me stay in prison.”

  “I told you to stay!” That was shouting, straight from Belpasso. Red in the face, breathless and loud. “I gave you that choice, Harry! Me or the Buford! Me or prison. All you had to do was say the word. One word! And you would have had what you wanted.” She was too close to him now, and they had nowhere to go.

  “I knew you didn’t mean it.”

  “I meant it! And still do—go now! Get out! No one is going to stop you from your heart’s desire, least of all me. Go!” Steam was coming out of her mouth, her ears, her very pores. She flailed at him, hit him with her arms, hit him with desperate blows to his head, his shoulders.

  He grabbed her wrists. “And what are you going to do?”

  “Don’t worry about me!” She tried to yank away. He wouldn’t let her go. They struggled, in the middle of their living room, in the middle of the morning, with the sun outside, the Boston Common, trolleys screeching to a stop under their windows. “What are you afraid of?” she panted. “Vada con Dio. Who’s stopping you? Go to Russia. Go with God.”

  “If I go, I take Alexander with me. He’s not staying with you.”

  She screamed in desperation. And still he wouldn’t let go of her.

  “What I want,” he said, gasping for air himself, “what I want most in the world is what I’ve always wanted. For you and me to be one. For us to share the same dream, you, me, our boy.”

  “Let go of me.”

  He let go. She fell away.

  “I admit,” he said, “Back then, I didn’t want to go to Russia by myself. Or now. I want us to go together. As a family.”

  “No.”

  “All I want is for my life to have meaning.”

  “Dream a different dream.” She was rubbing her wrists, hyperventilating, not looking at him.

  He stepped toward her.

  She staggered away. “Leave me alone.”

  “I didn’t want to work with my father because I don’t want to build the same old tired things! I want to build something that has never been built!” He was bowed over in his overwrought intensity, unable to continue.

  Like Panama. Gina straightened up. Her heart raced, but she appraised him coldly, despite his impassioned cry for understanding. Her eyes glazed over. She reached back in memory, recalling another time when she had this very discussion about the crux of all life: What was the price you were willing to pay for the thing you wanted most in the world?

  Her eyes on him softened. She was once what he wanted most.

  She searched again for the words that might convince him. “John Reed, Max Eastman. Have you read them since they’ve come back from the Soviet Union? It’s not just me, Harry. Everyone has become a skeptic, everyone has metamorphosed into a nonbeliever, has changed his opinion, his allegiance.”

  “They’re wrong,” Harry said. “Besides, I’m hardly going to take their word for it.”

  “Why not? You took their word for everything before.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t. I approved of them because they agreed with me. Not because I agreed with them. Now they’re no longer useful to me.”

  She stood in front of him, shoulders down, arms hanging. “Am I still useful to you?”

  He opened his hands. “What am I without you?” he whispered. “What am I without Alexander?”

  She opened her own hands in reply.

  “I can’t go without you,” Harry said. “The Soviets won’t let me enter without my family. I’ve been in touch with them through Comintern.” He bowed his head with remorse. “I’m sorry. After I lost my citizenship I had to start planning for our future. They’ll take us, but only if we’re together. Like Big Bill, they don’t want my allegiance to be divided. Me there, my family here.”

  “Would your allegiance be divided?” Gina asked. “Or . . .”—her voice cracked—“would it be wholly with them?”

  “Of course it would be divided. In any case, they think so.”
>
  “You can always divorce me, to placate them.”

  “I don’t want to divorce you, what are you saying? They don’t want a single man. Families are the bedrock of the new Soviet society. All the generations, the young and the old, become reborn.”

  Confusion reigned in Gina’s head. “It sounds so much like evangelization. It even uses the same language.”

  “Why are we arguing?” he asked. “This is who you married. This is who I was thirty years ago. This is who I am now. Did you think it was all posturing?”

  He stepped so close, his chest was almost touching her breasts. She stood like a pillar in front of him, letting him touch her, letting him caress her.

  “It was for me,” she said quietly.

  “What was for you?” He stroked her arms.

  “Posturing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you see?” She stepped away from his caress. Divided again. “How blind you are. How eternally blind. I don’t care about any of it. I never did.”

  “You did once.”

  Gina shook her head. “I never did. You have fundamentally misunderstood me.”

  “Unlike other men, perhaps, who might have understood you better?”

  Her hands flew to her heart. She cried out in anguish. “There are no other men! There was only you. From the moment I stepped off the boat, my heart was only yours. I was just a silly girl and you dismissed me, and I spent five years reforming myself for you. I finished high school for you and learned to work for you and read stupid books I had no interest in for you. I learned to talk politics and anarchy and socialism, I learned to read Russian, so I could read Bakunin, I read Marx, I pretended to be a feminist, not to care about religion or children—all for you!” She sobbed from the depths of her despairing soul. “I wore silk gloves because I loved them, yes, but mostly because in wearing them I made myself into the kind of woman I thought you could love. Into the kind of woman your family might accept. Because I thought that was what you wanted. A woman of your own kind.”

  “It was what I wanted,” Harry said in a stunned voice.

  “I know! So I gave you what you wanted. You wanted progressive? I gave you a modern version of the girl I never wanted to be. I wanted to run the restaurant with my brother and mother, have a house, have a baby with you, five babies! I might have dreamed about being a Harvard professor’s wife, but I didn’t want to march on the streets or be a Wobbly. I didn’t want Angela to die, or for you to be in prison, I didn’t want the unions or the syndicalists. All of it horrified me!”