Bellagrand: A Novel

by Simons, Paullina

  “Please, Ben. I know you and Esther talk. She can’t know. Not until we’re sure.”

  “She can help, Gina.”

  “No. She will only make things worse. Believe me.”

  “How can she make things any worse?”

  “Because Alexander makes her lose all reason. She will offer to keep him.”

  Ben nodded.

  “Don’t nod, Ben! She can’t have him. If we must go, he comes with us. Neither Harry nor I can have it any other way, will have it any other way. We will not leave him behind. Esther won’t understand, but you do, don’t you?”

  Ben said nothing. They wandered around the whole of Widener before he spoke again. The grass between the crisscrossing paths was blanketed with decaying leaves.

  “She can help you stay here.”

  “Please . . . you don’t understand, and I can’t explain.”

  “Fine.” He pulled his coat closed. “So what’s your question for me?”

  Gina lowered her troubled head. Her choices were so narrow, it was like threading twine into the head of a pin. “Every decision in life can’t be this painful,” she said.

  “No. Only the most difficult ones.” Ben paused. “Please let Esther help you, Gina. It’s not too late. She will use her father’s connections to keep Harry here.”

  “It is too late,” Gina said quietly. “Harry wants to go to Russia. Can she help with that?”

  “She is his sister. Maybe she can talk him out of it.”

  “I can’t talk him out of strong tea too late at night. But she’s going to talk him out of this?”

  “Gina!” Ben adjusted his hat and for a moment stopped speaking. After he collected himself and spoke, his voice was calmer. “Forget Harry for a moment. Do you think your father would have wanted you to leave America, to go to Russia?”

  She deflected away from the honest reply. Which was no. “Perhaps. I don’t know. He approved of all sorts of progressive ideas. Russia still feels like the future to me. Unknowable, that’s true . . .”

  “Is there any other kind of future?”

  “No, you’re right. I suppose not. Should I maybe find a fortune-teller to help me?” She smiled at him, tilting her head, trying to lure him into a smile in reply. Instead he curtly glanced at his watch. He was losing patience with her.

  “I need some advice from you, Ben,” Gina said quickly. “A word of wisdom. I need you to be my Rose Hawthorne.”

  “I’ll be whatever you need,” he said with an unsuppressed sigh. “What’s your question?”

  “Do you remember when you and I talked about Panama?”

  “Which time?”

  “Fifteen years ago.”

  “Oh, okay. Yes, of course. That conversation is top of mind.” Now he smiled, if barely.

  “I asked you then, if the heart of your only life was worth the sacrifice of going to Panama. Was your youth worth the risk, the threat, the danger, to do this impossible thing? And truly, it was impossible. A fifty-mile canal through mountains, one end at lower sea level than the other. And to do it in such a way that it permanently solved a grave international problem. The death, the disease, the expense, the sheer mechanical lunacy of it, do you remember the arguments and anger that flowed between men on this subject?”

  “Too well. I teach a graduate-level course on it. Next class is tonight at six o’clock, if you’d like to pop in, have a listen.”

  “What I’m asking is”—she regrouped—“don’t you think that in many ways, your past dilemma mirrors my own current mess, the life-and-death question before Harry and me? Well, before me, really, because Harry is not wavering. He made up his mind a long time ago.” Gina nudged Ben. “A little bit like you with Panama.”

  They both reluctantly acknowledged the truth of this.

  “So, the humans involved are just as intractable,” she went on, “and the issue of the future of the Soviet Union is as complex and uncertain as Panama. To build or not to build? To go or not to go? Will this fledgling thing that’s barely off the ground grow wings, or will it continue to be a bottom-dweller? Will it be a success, like Panama? Will it be worth it? You told me back then to ask you these questions in fifteen years because you couldn’t answer me when the canal first opened. So here I am, Ben. Little did I know how desperately I would need your answer. Was Panama worth the risk and the sacrifice?”

  “In the case of Panama,” Ben said, “the answer is an unequivocal yes. I haven’t lost my life to accident or disease, I’ve benefited from my association with the canal, both personally and professionally, and quite apart from me, it has transformed the world.”

  “Perhaps in a few years I’ll be able to say the same thing about the Soviet Union.”

  “Transformed the world for the better,” Ben amended.

  “Perhaps Russia will, too. Harry thinks so. He has faith.”

  “Like in God?”

  She nodded. “Man has to replace God with something.”

  Ben stayed silent.

  She knocked into him lightly. “Why are you so quiet?”

  “I don’t know if I’m on Harry’s side, Gina.”

  “Okay, but if you separate yourself from the personal . . .”

  “This isn’t personal. This has to do solely with the question you put before me. Men are always looking for the bright hope that changes imperfect humanity into a perfect brotherhood, a society of inequality into one of economic equals. It’s especially true of modern man. But the Soviet Union is no longer an abstraction, or as some economist once called it, ‘a social myth to mull over at the dinner table.’ It’s a real and tangible thing.”

  “Just like your Panama after it left the planning stage and entered the building stage.”

  Ben allowed the similarity, but unhappily. “The question isn’t about the future,” he said. “It’s about the here and now. With Panama, we knew how long the canal would take to build, and we knew when we could hope to see the effect of it on maritime travel and international trade. How long do we plan to wait with the Soviet Union? Have they given themselves a benchmark, a barometer? Look at what the Soviets are doing now, taking farms away from the Ukrainians at the point of a Tommy gun. My question is, if, despite Stalin’s best efforts, communism doesn’t flourish, erasing the need for government by such and such a date, will the Bolsheviks admit they’ve failed? Will they give the country back to the tsars and the farms back to the farmers?”

  “Well, no, clearly not to the tsars, since they’ve killed them all.” Gina didn’t know if they had killed all the Ukrainians.

  “So what’s Harry’s answer? How long are they giving themselves to succeed?”

  “As long as it takes, I suppose.” She squinted at him. Had Ben, too, been reading Max Eastman?

  “And if it doesn’t happen in your lifetime,” Ben said, “how will you know if you’ve done the right thing? Panama didn’t purport to be the answer to all the world’s problems. Panama was a practical solution to a narrow, concrete dilemma. Personally, I’m wary about global programs that are dependent on fundamentally altering mankind.”

  “Why do you say it won’t happen in our lifetime?” she asked. “Look at what Duranty wrote after returning from the Soviet Union. He is very optimistic.”

  “Gina, are you arguing from a strongly held conviction, or just arguing? When you discuss this with Harry, what side are you on?”

  She didn’t want to admit to Ben how many words she had used to try to change her husband’s mind. All the words. “I suppose on his side.” She stared at her feet.

  “Okay. Sometimes you must pay a heavy price for where you stand. Harry must have said this to you once or twice. So then, what advice could you possibly want from me?”

  She smiled. “Yes, Gina. Go. Of course it’s worth it.”

  Ben nodded. “Yes, Gina. Go. Of course it’s worth it.”

  “You’re just saying that. You don’t mean it.”

  He laughed. “I told you back then, even when I could tou
ch the immense change that was about to fall upon the globe, to ask me in fifteen years. Even when I was very sure, I told you I wasn’t sure.”

  “But I’m asking you to give me an answer now,” Gina said. “Is it worth it? To go and build communism in the Soviet Union the way you went and built the canal in Panama?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. “Are you willing to sacrifice your life for it?”

  She was mute.

  “I suppose you’d have to know the answer to one question,” he continued.

  “What’s that?”

  “At what price communism?”

  They wandered along the shadowy leafy paths between Weld and Grays. She knew it was time to head to Johnston Gate and out, but she didn’t want to.

  “I could ask you the same question,” she said. “At what price Panama?”

  “Ah,” said Ben. “Clearly when I was young, I believed the answer was: the ultimate price.”

  Was Harry willing to pay the ultimate price? Except it wasn’t just his head and hers he was staking on the tip of a sword. It was Alexander’s. Gina couldn’t stop shivering.

  They were almost at the brick and iron gate that led out to Peabody Street, the gate she had blocked twenty-five years earlier to trap Harry into love, into herself. Love never fails. But whether there be prophecies, they will fail. The future was unknowable. Only love was knowable.

  L’amore tollera ogni cosa, crede ogni cosa, spera ogni cosa, sopporta ogni cosa.

  “He is my husband, Ben,” Gina said. “He and Alexander are the only family I have left. He fully believes. And I have to believe in him. I hope he is proven right, as you were. That his leap of faith on Bolshevism will turn out to be as sound as your leap of faith about Panama.”

  “And what if it isn’t?”

  They stared at each other, at a loss for words.

  “We’ll have to cross that canal when we get to it,” she said at last.

  They had come to the end of the walk, the end of the conversation, the end. Awkwardly they moved off the path to the grass, to let the hurrying noisy students pass. She had to rush back home. He had to rush to prepare for his evening lecture. It was time to part.

  “Thank you for today,” she said. “I really needed it.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She stood motionlessly without touching him. Then she moved forward, opened her arms, and embraced him. She held her purse. He held his umbrella. She lowered her voice before she spoke into the collar of his coat. It was long ago what had passed like a song between them. They had lived many lives since then. And yet she couldn’t leave without acknowledging their gioia effimera condivisa.

  “I’ll never forget you, Ben,” she said. “I never have. I never will.”

  He squeezed her in reply, in a shudder, as if surprised by her intimate words. Holding her, his voice breaking, he spoke. “I thought Panama was the adventure of my lifetime,” he said into her hair. “But I was wrong. It wasn’t Panama. It was you.”

  “Please don’t say that.” A whisper. She tried to move away, but he wouldn’t let her.

  “Nothing in my life compares to the fleeting moments of glory I spent with you.” Now he let her go.

  “You don’t mean that. Please.”

  Silently he gazed upon her as they remained too close to each other, their coats touching, on the edge of Harvard Yard under the Japanese lanterns.

  She shook her head and stepped away, regret and repentance falling across her face. “It left us, Ben,” she said. “The maples, the willows, the ice skating.”

  “It didn’t leave us. We left it. I couldn’t build the canal now. I couldn’t part mountains and stanch eruptions of liquid clay. I don’t have the old vim anymore.”

  “Sometimes I feel my life is a slide on an eruption of clay.”

  “A glacier of mud.”

  “Marble and mud. That’s what Rose had told me.”

  Ben nodded. “She also told you to make the best of everything.”

  “Is going to Russia making the best of it?”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t go, Gia. That’s my true advice. Please don’t go.”

  She looked away, unable to bear the expression on his face, anxiety, other things.

  “So what do you think?” He tilted his head to catch her eye one last time. “Have I set you straight?”

  “I believe it’s too soon to know, mio amico,” Gina said, holding out her hand in farewell. “Ask me again in fifteen years.”

  Removing his hat and lowering his head, Ben brought her hand to his lips. He kissed it through her frayed silk glove, then pulled off the gray glove, turned her hand upward and kissed the bare skin inside her palm. Both he and she trembled slightly. They did not speak again. He bowed before he put on his hat and walked away, his squared, dark silhouette blending in with other men and disappearing out of view. At the edge of Massachusetts Avenue, she climbed aboard a bus. She cried all the way home.

  Two

  THE BLOOD DRAINED from Esther’s heart when over a month later she finally learned from Ben about Harry’s plan to move to the Soviet Union. She, a lady, who wore court shoes and long gloves, who never left the house unless completely put together, arrived at her brother’s doorstep on a Saturday morning unmade-up, unmanicured, manic-eyed, and without her hat. The only thing that saved them from a scandalous scene was Alexander. “Aunty Esther!” he said, kissing her and showing her his skates. “Why didn’t you come yesterday? I waited all evening for you.”

  “I’m sorry, dear one. I had a small emergency. I tried to call but . . .”

  “Yes, our telephone is out,” he said. “Please take me back with you right now. Because Teddy is playing a must-win hockey game at the pond this afternoon and I swore to him I’d be there.”

  “Darling,” Esther said, “it’s been over forty degrees this past week. The ice on the pond is not safe. The last thing you want to do is skate on it.”

  “I’m not skating. I’m cheering. Please? I promised.”

  “Son,” said Harry, intervening, “why would you promise Teddy something you can’t control?” He and Gina were at attention in the living room, Harry pretending to casually glance inside a newspaper, Gina not even pretending, standing stiffly in the farthest corner. She looked so elegant. She would have made a fine first Boston lady. A skeletal Boston lady. Esther couldn’t help but notice that Harry’s wife for the last of her Beacon Hill years had become the thinnest woman in the room.

  “Dad, by that definition, no one would ever promise anyone anything!” Alexander looked beseechingly at Esther. “Please,” he whispered intensely.

  “But I’m right, son,” said Harry. “You should never promise what you can’t control.”

  How did Esther continue smiling through the pointless talk? Somehow she managed—for her nephew. “We’ll see,” she said to him. “Let me talk to your mother and father first, darling.”

  “But we’ll go right after?”

  “I’ll try. I can’t promise.”

  He squeezed her hand, blessedly oblivious to her deathly pallor and stricken expression. “If you take me with you,” he whispered, “I will sit for your dumb Christmas portrait.”

  Leaning forward, she pressed her mouth to the top of his black head. He was growing so tall. Soon he would have to bend to her for a kiss. “Go play in the park for a few minutes. Get yourself some ice cream.” She fumbled in her bag for some change. Her fingers felt like swollen sausages; they couldn’t grasp the coins. “Here you go. Now let me talk to your mother and father.”

  Alexander ran from the apartment, leaving the three grown-ups in a Mexican standoff.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” Esther said. She saw from her brother’s closed expression that he would be impervious to persuasion. He had the look of someone who was being accosted by a cat, or a bird.

  “What is the matter, Esther? You seem distraught.”

  “Please tell me what I’ve heard is wrong. Please tell me you ar
e not seriously thinking of taking your family to”—how did she even speak?—“the Soviet Union.”

  Frowning, Harry hesitated. “Where did you hear that?” He glared at Gina. “I thought you and I agreed not to say anything?”

  Gina opened her hands and shook her head.

  “Esther?”

  In the mute polka dance of strangled allegiances that followed, Gina looked away from Harry and at Esther, who was staring at her sister-in-law, staring at her piercingly and yet pleadingly, as if to say, Gina! I know you have been visiting Ben, trying to help my brother, and for reasons known only to you, you have not told Harry of this, and for reasons known only to him, my brother, despite living thirty minutes away from his oldest friend, has not been in touch with Ben in seven years. Ben has not been in touch with Harry either, though he is clearly not averse to helping him—or is it helping you? I know this, you know this, and I have said nothing. I will say nothing now, if you heed the silent scream inside my throat, if you heed your own conscience. Tell me what you want me to say to my brother. All of it was in Esther’s unyielding gaze.

  Gina furtively caught Esther’s eye, and melted away. She lowered her head.

  Esther turned to Harry. “Ask your wife,” she said, “how I might know of this.”

  “Gina has no idea, Esther,” Harry said. “Perhaps through our former lawyer, Mr. Domarind?”

  “Not through him.”

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t know what’s going on between you two right now, just as I don’t know what’s been going on between you for years. It’s not important. However you found out, Esther, it is true, we are going to the Soviet Union.”

  Esther squeezed together the bones of her fingers, as if she wanted them to break. “Were you ever going to tell me? Or were you just going to vanish into thin air?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Harry said. “We were going to talk to you this week.”

  “As you talked to Alice a full week before your wedding date to inform her that you had married someone else—oh, wait.”

  “Not someone else, but my wife, and Alexander’s mother—”

  Both women groaned at the sound of the same word: Alexander.