Bellagrand

by Paullina Simons

  Bareheaded, Ben leaned forward and kissed her. Their lips weren’t icy, their breath wasn’t icy. Her legs went out from under her, she lost her balance and fell and he fell too, the hat slipping out of his gloved hands and rolling onto the ice like a wheel.

  Gina didn’t stay overnight at the Wayside that evening. Or again. She stayed at Ridge House with Ben.

  Oh, to be touched, to be loved.

  The pain will go away.

  No, it won’t. But it will be hidden for a while.

  What are we doing, what will become of us, what have we done.

  Just planting flowers, gardening, weeding.

  This is not that.

  No, it’s better. It’s sweeter.

  Do you know how long I have loved you, Ben whispered. How long I have longed for this.

  Don’t tell me. Don’t ever tell me. Plant the violets, watch them grow, cut them down. Don’t speak about the intervening years. Please.

  This is so sweet.

  Yes, it’s like the syrup from the sugar maples.

  And hills and streams, the wild, the swallow, the sparrow, it’s aster, birch, and pine. It’s everything.

  She didn’t reply. It wasn’t everything.

  Can you believe, he whispered to her, that Louisa May Alcott thought Concord was the grayest of towns?

  I don’t believe it. She lived and died here.

  Yes. But she said the last time the town saw a startling hue was when the redcoats were here.

  Gina laughed, her breath so hot, it could have burned Ben’s throat.

  The red maple is the brightest scarlet, he whispered into her slick neck, into her parched mouth. It’s the most vivid of all earthly things.

  This she believed.

  Oh, to be touched, to be loved.

  They had a linen-colored room facing the morning sun. And on Sundays, after a night of love, a morning of tenderness, of kindness, they didn’t want to venture out into the world of the sick and the downtrodden, and even the incarcerated. Leaving the room felt like torture.

  Please don’t ever be unhappy, she would say to him. What a blessing to wake up here and see your loving face. Every week I kiss it, I thank our gracious Lord for blessing me so bountifully.

  You’re not Salome, are you, Gina?

  I don’t know. She pondered. The name sounded vaguely familiar. It was precisely because the name was so unusual that it jogged her memory. The strict Catholic education came in handy when playing bedroom games with her Panamanian explosive-detonating lover.

  Does Salome have something to do with John the Baptist?

  Give this girl a prize! Ben grinned with pleasure. Not just beautiful, but smart too.

  She pinched him lightly. If I’m Salome, are you equating yourself with John the Baptist, a messenger heralding the coming of Jesus?

  Perhaps I’m King Herod instead, Ben said.

  If you’re Herod, then who do I ask you to behead, as I bask in my wickedness?

  They dropped the analogy. I told you, you weren’t Salome.

  I’m not Cassia either, Gina said. Luke’s repentant woman. All she wants is to be forgiven for her sins.

  One day that will be you.

  One day it will be me. Just not yet.

  She raised her lips to him, her face, her long, bare arms, her hips. Not yet. Not yet.

  You are red wine to me, to my mouth, he whispered, covering them, both man and woman, with the ardent white quilt, climbing, climbing.

  They christened Macone’s ice pond with kisses.

  They drank beer at a small table at Wright’s Tavern and pretended to be married. They walked arm in arm like lovers.

  They went ice skating on all the Concord ponds, big Goose and little Goose, Crosby, White (that glistened like black diamonds). Warner’s. Walden. And Fairyland hidden in the secret woods where the bears slept. He taught her how to skate backward and on one foot and do crossovers, spin fast with joy.

  She stopped going to ring the bells for Jesus’ five wounds on Sunday mornings. Stopped because she couldn’t.

  Stopped going regularly to visit Harry on Sunday afternoons.

  Stopped because she couldn’t.

  The less she came, the more impersonal Harry became when she did visit. Smiling politely, trying to be warm, soliciting words she longed for but never heard, she instead let him regale her with the Russian he’d learned, listened to him read Marxist verse in Russian, from Lenin, from Trotsky, as if he were reading Lord Byron. He didn’t want her to talk. He wanted to hear nothing about her family or Lawrence. He didn’t care about Rose’s Home. He no longer asked about Elston Purdy or his chance of parole. Mostly he talked about Lenin and Kerensky and the Romanovs, and she pretended to listen. He spoke about the political agitation happening in Russia the way other people talked about their children or their lovers.

  She learned how to cook Panamanian rice with chicken for Ben, and tamales, to bake bread so sweet it tasted holy. Since she couldn’t and didn’t receive Communion on Sundays anymore, it was the only bread that crossed her lips.

  When the snowbanks melted and lilac ornaments adorned the Concord paths, Ben took her to pick strawberries at Maplewood Farm. She made him warm strawberry jam. He took her rowing on Sudbury River. He taught her how to drive.

  Chapter 5

  MARBLE AND MUD

  One

  IT HAD RAINED AND SNOWED, and was now black and awful outside. As soon as Gina ran down the steps of her house and got into his car, she could tell Ben knew that something was wrong. It was the deep fall of 1915. The leaves were long off the trees. He picked her up on Saturday mornings now and drove her to Concord so she wouldn’t have to take the train and bus.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, the smile of happy greeting wiped off his face. “You look like you’ve received the worst news. What is it?” He paled, couldn’t continue driving. He pulled over. “Oh God, you’re not . . .”

  “Harry is coming home,” she said. “For Christmas.”

  Ben got back on the road.

  “When?” he said, after he’d been driving a while.

  “Monday week.”

  “Just for Christmas? Like furlough?”

  She was silent. “No.”

  Another twenty miles went by.

  Then thirty.

  Then they were in Concord.

  For ten hours they worked side by side without saying much except to attend to the sick before them. She scrubbed, he carried. She changed dressings, made food. He cleaned pails and fixed locks. During their short breaks they drank tea in the kitchen, wordlessly.

  At night in their little rented room in Ridge House down a steep hill through the fields and meadows and a stream away from the Wayside, they lay in the dark face to face. The fire had almost burned out in the stone enclosure, the candles had long dimmed, frost covered the night windows.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What can we do?”

  “Come away with me,” Ben said, staring intensely at her.

  “Come away with you where?”

  “Panama. We could have a wedding. The weather is great. There is no snow.” He touched her fiery lips with the tips of his fingers.

  “So no ice skating?”

  “No, but swimming. Fishing. Lots of it. Rivers. Lakes. A mighty sea. An even mightier ocean.”

  Keeping her arms around him, Gina closed her eyes to hide her throbbing heart. They didn’t want to speak too loud, wanted to stay quiet, silent, mute, oh, but to be able to read each other’s thoughts. “I can’t leave America, Ben,” she finally said. “I came to America. I’m not like you. When you start here, it’s true, you can go someplace else. But when you achieve America, when you receive it as a gift, it’s unseemly to snub your nose at it.”

  “Well, it’s not really a nose-snubbing,” Ben said. “After all, if it weren’t for America, there’d be no Panama Canal. So it would be an extension of your gratefulness.”

&nb
sp; She caressed his face. “Vorrei poterlo fare,” she whispered inaudibly. “Ma non posso.”

  He spoke Spanish, not Italian. She whispered it to him in Spanish. Ojalá pudiera. Pero no puedo.

  “You don’t want to think about it? We don’t have to leave. We could stay in Boston. I have my job. I would take good care of you. I would take care of everything. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  “More than I want to admit.”

  “You’d never have to work again, you could just do what you wanted, get your degree, become a professor, learn jazz on the piano. I hear it’s becoming all the rage. Have babies . . .” He took a breath. “What I would give to have a baby with you.”

  Gina shuddered. What she would give to have a baby, period. But she couldn’t bring a child into a miry bog such as this, no.

  “I haven’t been very good at the baby part,” she said.

  “You’re extraordinary at everything, Gia,” said Ben. “I’ve never met a more beautiful human being than you.”

  “Ben . . .” She trailed off, trying hard not to cry. “You make me so happy. I didn’t realize how sad and lonely I had been until you reappeared in my life. You and me, we had such joy, didn’t we?”

  “We did.”

  “We picked berries and made eggnog.”

  “You made me arroz con leche.”

  “Yes.”

  “We ice-skated and raced my car.”

  “We took care of sick people.”

  “And this.”

  “And this.”

  Afterward they clung to each other. “Ben Shaw!” she cried in the night. “Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? He gave up everything to marry me.” Gina almost couldn’t continue. “Every single thing he ever had and valued, he gave up—to be with me. Turning my back on him would be like turning my back on America, wouldn’t it?”

  “Maybe he didn’t value what he had,” Ben said coolly. “Did you ever think of that? Does he value you?”

  “Yes and yes, and I don’t agree,” said Gina. “You and he were inseparable. And his Harvard friends. His family, his sister, his house, his station, his purse! Everything. He had a whole life, Ben, that he threw away. I know something about this, what it means to leave behind the only life you know.”

  “Exactly. You leave because you think you’re headed to something better.”

  “Right,” whispered Gina. “And that something better would be me. That’s what I’m saying.”

  Ben shook his head. “He wasn’t that close to them. He had a terrible conflict with his father.”

  “That’s normal father–son affairs. My own father and my oldest brother constantly butted heads.” She tutted tearfully. “Until Antonio got stabbed and killed, but again, that was because he hadn’t listened to Papa.”

  “Harry and Herman were not just butting heads.”

  “Herman lost his wife, Ben. That’s not easy for anyone. A father left alone with two motherless children to raise. Herman is not Mimoo. It’s tougher for men, especially busy, successful men like Herman. And Harry and Esther were permanently bonded by this unspeakable grief.”

  “How permanent can it be if he turned his back on her? Are you sure it’s unspeakable?” Ben was skeptical even when naked.

  “Yes,” she replied. “You know how I know? Because he never speaks of it. To lose your mother, I can’t even begin . . .” She didn’t want to continue that discussion. “I know how it is with me and my brother,” Gina resumed. “I couldn’t imagine my life if he weren’t in it. And yet Harry . . .”

  “The Barringtons weren’t that kind of family.”

  “Still family, though, Ben. Fractured, yes, but still father, son, daughter. And yet Harry surrendered his birthright, his inheritance, his place in the world. You think it’s easy for him to live broke, to sleep in the small bedroom next to my mother? He did it for me.”

  “What I mean is . . .” Ben searched for words. “Maybe saying he didn’t value all the things you speak of is not quite correct, but now that I look back, I think Harry had always been looking for a way out.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Out of that life. It was an ill-fitting suit. He didn’t wear it well.”

  Gina pushed Ben away. “Why is it,” she said, cooler and less teary, “that when men postulate about the motives of other men they forget that they’re also talking about the women attached to them?”

  “I remember the woman attached to Harry.”

  Because that woman was now attached to him.

  “Yes, but what you’re saying is, if his former life meant little to him, then the sacrifice of it wasn’t so monumental. What you’re saying is, the price for me was smaller than I led myself to believe. You are devaluing me, to me! In bed as we lie here together.”

  “I’m sorry, Gina. I didn’t mean it.” He faced away from her in contrition. “I’m drowning and grabbing on to anything to stay afloat. What can I say to persuade you?”

  “You can’t justify it away, Ben, Harry’s sacrifice. I wasn’t an excuse for him to run the other way. He didn’t chance upon me like an object in the sand and say Eureka! Think about how long he spent hiding what he felt for me from you, from me, from his family, from himself. Years! From the very beginning when we met you on the Freedom Docks. And you also forget that in fateful 1905, he wasn’t out looking for me. Just the opposite. He was ready to marry Alice. I was the one who was searching for him. I was the one who found him. Not the other way around.”

  “Forgive me.” Ben pulled her to him, cradling her, his arms around her soft, bare back. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m crazy, you are right. When I came back from Panama, I was the one who went out looking for you. What can I sacrifice? I’ll give it all up—instantly.”

  “Ben . . . please. I don’t need that. I didn’t want it from Harry. I don’t want it from you. Think what you’re asking of me. I’ll have to get a divorce . . .”

  “Okay. You weren’t even married in a church.”

  “Good thing, too,” she returned, “since the Catholics wouldn’t consider it.”

  He fell silent.

  “And think about my mother. The government just established Mother’s Day as a national holiday, and yet I’m going to sail off and leave her? What am I going to do with my mother, did you think of that?”

  “We’ll take her with us.”

  “She won’t survive the trip. And she won’t leave Salvo. She doesn’t want to go. For the same reason I don’t. She came to America, this is the promised land. Not Panama.”

  “Would you leave America for Harry? If he asked you?”

  Gina breathed heavily, regretfully. “Let’s hope we never get to find out the answer to your terrible question,” she said.

  “So let’s stay here,” Ben said. “With Mimoo. You love Boston. We’ll move to Beacon Hill just like you dreamed when you were a young girl. We’ll live in a big brownstone and we’ll go skating on Frog Pond on the Common.”

  “Ben, amico mio,” she whispered. “I would love that. But I’m married. I can’t.”

  Minutes passed in mute darkness. Minutes or hours?

  “I want to ask you a Rose Hawthorne question,” he said. “Let men tremble to win the hand of a woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart.” He swallowed as if reluctant to ask. “Does Harry have the utmost passion of your heart?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Does he still have it?”

  She didn’t answer.

  No sound but Ben’s wretched struggle for calm breath.

  “I thought . . .” He almost cried. “I thought you loved me.”

  “I do,” she said haltingly. “I still can’t leave him.”

  “So what am I going to be to you? A chapter you’ve finished? A book you’ve thrown away?”

  She said nothing. You don’t throw away your favorite books, she wanted to say to him, but didn’t.

  She had never been treated as decently, as generously, wi
th as much kindness as she had been by Ben. Why wasn’t it enough?

  “I am a Sicilian woman.”

  “I thought you were an American woman.”

  “I’m Sicilian where it counts. He is my husband. On the scales I weigh my life on, that outweighs everything else.” Except maybe motherhood. But she wouldn’t know. “When Sicilian women get married, they get married for life.”

  When they were alone, in bursts and glimmers, between strikes and subjugations, Harry still communed with her, still intimately adored her. She was bound by love.

  “There is no way out of this for us, Ben,” she whispered.

  “Except out.”

  “Except out.”

  Purple petals have fallen into our ice pond, Ben whispered brokenly. I will write your name on it in violets.

  She held Ben closer, until no closer was possible. What they had was a blissful interlude, a fairyland reverie between one life and another. But what kind of life waited for her on the other side? And what if Harry’s once mystical love for her could not be roused from its deathlike slumber?

  Two

  BEN AND GINA PICKED UP Harry together from the Concord prison. They waited for him outside the gates on Elm Street, standing far apart, orienting themselves only toward the redbrick building, and presently he appeared in the same suit and tie he had been sentenced in, carrying a black bag. He was thin, drawn, but clean-shaven and neatly trimmed. If he was surprised to see Ben, he did not show it, other than in a stiffening of his body. He and Ben shook hands, even hugged. Then Harry leaned coolly toward Gina. He didn’t meet her eyes.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, returning his near-formal embrace.

  “I’m fine, why wouldn’t I be?” He turned to Ben. “What are you doing back? Your work done?”

  “Work’s never done,” Ben said. “In fact, I was thinking I might go back soon.”

  Gina sucked in her breath—but managed to stay quiet.

  “How long have you been back?”

  “Over a year now.”

  “Over a year, you don’t say.” Harry didn’t so much as glance in Gina’s direction. “So, the entire time I’ve been inside?”

  “You’re right, it couldn’t be that long—let’s go, my car’s right over there.”