Bellagrand

by Paullina Simons

  “Didn’t they just have a revolution last month?” It was 1917. “The Tsar abdicated, Kerensky is signing decrees with a gold pen in the Winter Palace. How many uprisings can they have in one year? But more to the point, what do their buffets of revolutions have to do with our business, yours and mine?”

  “Only everything.”

  “Only nothing. Why would we go to Russia? The annual Boston spring fair is next month. I wouldn’t mind going to that.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am.”

  “Max said he would raise money for John Reed and me to go.”

  “Wonderful,” she said. “He can’t raise ten dollars to pay you for a week’s work. But he’s going to raise money to get you to Russia?”

  “I desperately want to be part of something bigger, to be part of history. Don’t you?”

  “Um . . . no.”

  “You’ve become so provincial.” Unamused, he returned to leafing through the paper. “I realize when it happened. The moment you became hell-bent on having a child, your concerns now begin and end with the bedroom. Shame, really. You used to have such an abundance of other passions.”

  “Funny that. There was once a time you used to have only one.” She said it because she knew he would ignore her words, and true to himself, Harry didn’t disappoint. He ignored them. She said quite a lot to him that he simply ignored.

  “Louise Bryant is going.” That was to bait her. Because he knew she ignored nothing. Louise was John Reed’s wife. As if she were the perfect wife, this prize of a woman who married John Reed and immediately set up house with his best friend, the playwright. Gina wouldn’t be baited. Not yet. He tap-tapped at the paper. “Lenin just returned to Petrograd from Geneva. A triumphant return to the country that exiled him. He’s ready to overthrow Kerensky and the Mensheviks who have betrayed the communist cause by making devil’s bargains with absolutely everyone.”

  “And is Lenin promising not to make devil’s bargains with anyone?”

  “Of course.” He stood up to come near her.

  “Well,” Gina said, “if what you’re saying is true, then Petrograd is the last place you and I want to be.”

  “No, please be serious.” He took her by the arms and turned her to him.

  “Do I seem facetious to you?” Her solemn brown unimpressed eyes met with his inflamed gray ones.

  “We must go.” He stopped. The look on her face must have been a sight. “I must go.”

  She shrugged as if to say, you do what you must do.

  Harry continued his persuasion. “Your Emma Goldman is going.”

  “I care about this why?”

  “Come on, princess. We will go for solidarity.” He shook her a little. “Gina! I have been dreaming of this moment.”

  “You’ve always been a dreamer, that’s true. But dreaming of going to Russia?”

  “Yes!”

  “Quietly, then, because this is the first I’m hearing of this particular dream.”

  “I have been talking about nothing but this moment for twenty years.”

  “About going to Russia?” She tried not to sound incredulous.

  “I have to go . . . to watch a new order be born. To stand shoulder to shoulder with giants. To bear witness to the most radical change your eyes will ever see.”

  “Radical change?” She emptied the dried dead flowers out of the grimy vase. She used to always have fresh flowers in the house. It had been weeks since these tulips had withered and died in a centerpiece on her table. “Harry, do you forget I’m an immigrant? I came from a volcanic town. My father cut hair for free for all the poor people in Belpasso and charged the rich people triple so he could save enough for me to come here.” She laughed. “America is my radical change. I came here on a boat, remember? I told—” She broke off. It wasn’t Harry she had told this. She blinked to shake off the past, the memories, everything. “And I will tell you again”—Oh, what an elision, what a fraud—“I have zero interest in leaving this country.”

  “Not forever,” Harry said. “For a month. Maybe three.”

  “Last time I heard that, you were in prison fifteen months. And what do I do with my mother?”

  “Stop hiding behind her, for once. You can’t move to Boston, to New York, can’t go to Russia. You might as well be in Belpasso for all the good America’s doing you.”

  “What, I came to America to abandon my mother? My father would be well pleased.”

  “Can’t Salvo take care of her?”

  “What is it with you men?” She shook her head.

  “What men?”

  “Harry, Salvo has been paying half of the rent for three years, while you’ve been yodeling for The Masses.”

  “Max Eastman calls me indispensable to our publication!”

  “Salvo pays Mimoo’s doctor’s bills. He comes to visit her on Sundays.” Though not today because Harry was home. “He cooks for her when he comes. But he is not her daughter. He can’t take care of her. He is a man.” She wanted to ask if Harry could have taken care of his own mother, but she knew the conversation would then snap to an instant halt. Perhaps that was preferable.

  “She’ll be fine for a month. She’s got a townful of friends. She knows every single person we pass on the street. Last time I took her shopping it took us forty-five minutes to walk two blocks! She’s got more friends than I’ve had dinners. Come on, Gia. History!” Harry was beseeching, not authoritarian. “Aren’t you the least bit excited?” He was turning forty in a few months. His hair was lightened a shade by the oncoming gray, but it didn’t look gray, more like sand after rain. He was still slim and thoughtful, put-together and rumpled at the same time, as if the clothes fit or didn’t, and he was all right either way. His eyes were sparkling clear. They weren’t fog and they weren’t slate. She hadn’t seen him this animated in months, maybe years. It made her slightly happy to see him excited, but only slightly, and she wouldn’t admit it to him.

  “Not the least bit.” She turned back to the sink. The dead tulips thrown away, she scrubbed the inside of the filthy vase. “Harry, you’ve been in constant trouble with the law. What if they don’t let you come back?”

  “Not constant. I’ve been careful lately.”

  “They’re threatening to close down The Masses because of the stuff you write.”

  “I know,” he said proudly. “I told you Max says I’m indispensable.”

  “Yes—to me, not to him.”

  Nicely true to form he ignored her. “And why wouldn’t they let me come back? And who’s they?”

  “The Americans.”

  There was a silence from him as if he were speaking one step behind the beat of his thoughts.

  Encouraged, she went on. “America has just entered the war . . .”

  Unfortunately this sent him in another direction, an apoplexy of vitriol against Wilson. “The man got reelected on one slogan!” he said. “One. Do you remember what it was?”

  “I do,” she replied, “but I don’t care.”

  “He kept us out of war. That’s it. Six words got him reelected. That was what, four months ago?”

  “He did keep us out of war—for almost three years. Maybe that’s what he meant. He did use the past tense.”

  “You’re joking, right? Hair-splitting over fraud perpetrated upon the American people?”

  “Besides,” Gina continued, calmer than her husband, “Wilson told us the war would be over in a flash. The most it would take, he said, is six weeks.”

  “Six weeks?” Harry sneered. “He also wants to sell you a bridge. Mark my words, the clang of noisome machines is about to be ousted by the clatter of even more noisome machine guns.”

  “Don’t be such a pessimist, Harry,” she said. “Dream bigger. Wilson thinks you can have both.”

  He laughed. “I’m not a pessimist,” he said. “I’m an eternal optimist.”

  “I was joking. You did laugh, correct?”

  “I always tell you not to worry ab
out anything. I always tell you everything will turn out all right. This too.” Turning her away from the vase and the dead flowers, he took her into his arms, toward himself and his agitation. “We’ll go to Russia to get away from Wilson’s foul oppression of lies and deceit.”

  “The laws have gotten so much stricter,” said Gina, spooling her long arms around his neck. “You can’t behave like you used to. They’ll throw us both out of the country.” She kissed him. “They’ll say we were supporting the Bolsheviks.”

  “We are supporting the Bolsheviks.” He kissed her back. “I’m an American citizen. They can’t refuse me reentry into my own country.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  He wavered. “Almost certain.”

  “It’s dangerous out there,” she said, trying a different tactic. When Harry wanted something this intensely, it had always been difficult to move his needle in a different direction. He was the same way with everything, whether or not it made sense, whether or not it was good for his life, for business, for his marriage. Sometimes that persistence was arousing. Sometimes it was exasperating. And sometimes it was frightening. This felt a little like all three. They were standing spousally close. She didn’t want to move away. “The Lusitania was torpedoed, full of civilians,” she said. “What if we won’t be able to come back through the war-torn seas?”

  “So we’ll stay on for a few more months. Just you and me.” He tilted his head.

  Shaking hers, Gina kept silent. Bad portents flew like crows through her insides. She moved away from him, her attention back on the vase. The glass was permanently stained. It was not going to get crystal clean no matter how hard she scrubbed it.

  He came up behind her, close, so close. His arms went around her waist, his face pressed into her hair. “Gia, what’s really behind this?”

  She didn’t want to say. She didn’t want to go, that was plain, this she told him. But she didn’t want to say what was really behind this, not yet.

  She changed the subject the only way she knew how. “Well, you’re behind me for now.” She wiped her hands dry and turned to him for good. She lured him away from Russia with her willing, receptive, vulnerable body, hoping it would be enough and he would let it go.

  As always, Harry let the wrong thing go. A few days later he told her that Max Eastman couldn’t raise enough money for Harry and for John Reed to travel to Russia. Harry asked her if they had enough money in the bank to pay for two third-class tickets to France. She showed him the bank ledger. They didn’t have nearly enough for two sea passages, two train tickets, plus money to live in Petrograd. Gina closed the bank book with barely hidden satisfaction, hoping that would be the end of that, practical matters resolving his abundant enthusiasm.

  But Harry had other ideas.

  “Clearly both of us can’t go,” he said, pacing through the living room. “Your mother is not well anyway. You said so yourself. And you don’t really want to go. You said so yourself. I’ll go by myself. I’ll be back for Christmas.”

  “As if Christmas has some kind of special significance for you!” Sicilian-like, not Boston-like. She wished she didn’t feel so run over by the turn of this ludicrous conversation.

  “I don’t want to go without you,” he said. “You know that. I don’t want to be away from you. But I desperately want us to go. Please. Can we hock your wedding ring? We’ll have enough for a trip around the world and back with the money we get from it.”

  She became so weak she had to sit down.

  “You want me to sell my wedding ring?” she said in horror.

  “Not sell, pawn.”

  “And how do you propose we will ever get it back? What’s your plan for getting it out of hock? You’re mad! You’ve lost your mind.”

  “What’s gotten into you? Why are you snapping at me like a turtle?”

  “Harry, we’re not giving away my wedding ring. Never.”

  “I’ll go by myself then. We have just enough for me to go.”

  Gina chewed her lip as if she were trying to chew it off.

  “We don’t have enough money for the revolution and a baby,” she said haltingly.

  He was momentarily stunned into silence. “Who said anything about a baby?”

  “I’m saying it now.”

  He was stunned into a longer silence.

  “Oh, so this one you do bother to tell me about,” he said dully, sounding defeated.

  “You told me to tell you everything.”

  “You could’ve waited to tell me after I left.”

  “What?”

  “Written me a letter. Sent me a telegram. Never mind.”

  “I’m telling you now because I don’t want you to go. And we have good reason not to. I certainly can’t go.” She palmed her still flat stomach.

  “How far along?”

  “A few months. Around three.”

  He looked down on the table, at their bank book, at maps of Russia, newspapers of war and disaster, posters of proletarians.

  “I’ll be back before it’s born,” he said weakly.

  “It’s due in October 1917,” she said. “What if you’re not back? What if the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks get into a scuffle and the upheaval continues until then? What if you get thrown into prison there, get sick, or . . . worse? You want your child to grow up without a father?”

  “It’s the revolution . . .” he said.

  “Mio amore, the baby is also a revolution,” said Gina.

  Harry didn’t go.

  Two

  SIX WEEKS LATER, in June 1917, just as The Masses was being shut down by the Espionage Act, Gina started to bleed. She stopped all work, all movement, lay in bed, and prayed, tried to save herself, save her child. No success, only sorrow.

  There was no hiding this loss from him even for five minutes. She lay in her bed while a crying Mimoo changed her dressings, and a mute Harry slept sitting up on the couch. Both devastated, they took out their crushing disappointment on each other. He blamed her for forcing him “for no reason” to miss out on the greatest experience of his life. And she, beyond blaming anything or anyone, feeling responsible for everything, disappeared wholly inside herself. She became nearly mute, stopped speaking. She prayed only to become like Helen Keller before the water flowed into her palm, to live in a place inside her soul where no words, no symbols, no sounds had any meaning.

  To get away from Lawrence, Harry scrambled to get his visa application approved for Russia, but was informed by the State Department it was already too late. With the war raging and the United States in the midst of it, only a few exit visas per year were currently allowed, and they had all been applied for and allotted until January 1918.

  Harry was forced to read about the storming of the Winter Palace from John Reed’s dispatches to Max Eastman and relate it to Gina with barely controlled hostility. And she, with barely controlled hostility, pretended to listen.

  “Lenin has abolished all private property,” said Harry. “One of his thirteen decrees upon taking power.”

  “Abolished,” Gina repeated. “It’s now illegal in Russia to own land?”

  “Correct. All property finally belongs to the working man.”

  “Ah. What about all the men who presently own land or real estate in Russia?”

  “They’re out of bounds of the new law.”

  “So what happens to their property?”

  “It will be confiscated, I guess.”

  “Nice,” said Gina, going back to her sewing. The pedal went down, the machine resumed its rat-tat-tat sound. “Taking the pails from other kids in the sandbox. I’m sure that’ll happen without a fight.”

  “What did you say?” The noise of the sewing machine partly covered her words.

  “Nothing, nothing. I was being ironic. I almost smiled.” There was not a glimmer of a smile on her face.

  After the Bolshevik Revolution in October but no baby, Harry became even more vociferously antiwar. The more Gina implored him to stay
quiet, the louder he railed. He fully supported Lenin’s pledges to pull Russia out of the war. Russia was not only communist now, but pacifist; two ideals Harry fell firmly behind. Weeks after Lenin took power, Russia stopped fighting on the side of the Allies and brought its soldiers home. Trotsky started negotiating with Germany for a separate peace. Everywhere in the United States, in Britain, in France, Russia was condemned as a traitor. The war could be lost by the Allies because of Russia’s actions, was what everyone wrote in their newspapers and editorials. But in Harry’s circles, Russia was a heroine. They could not say or write enough about her bravery for The Masses. The magazine was shut down twice for seditionist prose, and its chief editors taken to court.

  Once Harry was free of the burdens of editing literary and political criticism and had some time on his hands, he began to attend every antiwar rally, big and small, in the vicinity of Boston, many in the presence of Emma Goldman. “No one says things against the war as clearly and vigorously as she,” Harry told Gina. “Why do you refuse to come with me, now that I’m starting to really respect her?”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Gina replied, wishing for less cleverness from both Goldman and her husband, who with their public remonstrations were flying headlong like blind birds into the Espionage Act.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Harry told an increasingly anxious Gina. “Worry only about what’s right.”

  In March 1918, Leon Trotsky finally signed a separate peace with Germany, ceding to the Central Power two-thirds of Russia’s territory and a quarter of her population.

  “I see what you mean, Harry,” said Gina, “about Lenin never making a devil’s bargain with anyone like that snake Kerensky. You’re right, he’s nothing if not an honorable man.”

  They didn’t speak for a week after she said that.

  A month later, in April 1918, Harry and a hundred others were arrested at the ill-fated recruitment station near Faneuil Hall during a loud demonstration that had turned violent. He was arrested after a futile year of protesting an inevitable war, a war everyone knew with cloudless clarity that the United States, a new global power, must one day join and would one day join. There was brutal language and an assault on three police officers. But most damagingly, there was once again the willful obstruction of a recruiting enlistment station, an act that was suddenly, as Harry found out only after he was openly charged, punishable by twenty years in prison as per the newly enacted sedition clauses of the Espionage Act.