Bellagrand

by Paullina Simons

  And Father O’Reilly, as if picking up on the black mood, read from Matthew for the funeral sermon, the parable of the Ten Virgins.

  “Five were wise, but five were foolish,” he said. “The wise ones brought the oil for their lamps to meet the bridegroom, but the foolish ones left their oil behind. The bridegroom tarried. They slept. And then He came. The fools jumped up. Give us your oil, they said to the others, for our lamps are going out.

  “Yet they failed. Not the humanity of those they asked, not the simplicity of their request, not their want, made them obtain what they wanted. Because no man can protect us if we are not ready,” Father O’Reilly said. “Not because he will not, but because he cannot.

  “They ran to buy the oil and missed the bridegroom. I know you not, He said to them when they finally knocked on His door.

  “So brothers and sisters, servants of God, I beseech you, the good Lord beseeches you, carry oil in your lamps, for you know not the day nor the hour. How frequently our Lord adds this admonition to us concerning the terrible ignorance of our earthly departure. You know not the day nor the hour. Be ready.”

  Peculiarly the sermon had the opposite of its intended effect. The sobbing and coughing, the lack of comfort, and the increase in fear became only more resounding after the priest had finished.

  Salvo couldn’t stop crying—before or after Father O’Reilly, as if the priest were incidental to Salvo’s sorrow. He wasn’t numb like Gina or unwell like her. He had been working and couldn’t get to the hospital before Mimoo died. He was inconsolable about not saying goodbye. “Just last week I saw her,” he kept repeating.

  “She wasn’t well last week either, Salvo. You kissed her goodbye when you left, didn’t you?”

  He wiped his nose in the wet windy weather. They were walking to the church reception hall after burying their mother. “I know,” he said. “But she was better than this. She was alive.”

  They stayed together for a day or two afterward in their lonely house. Gina tried to talk to Salvo about Harry, but Salvo was an exceptionally hostile audience. She let it go.

  “Come back, Salvo,” Gina said to him. “I don’t want to live alone. Stay with me.”

  “If I stay with you, we’ll both be on the street because I’ll be out of work. How can I pay your rent?”

  “Get a job here. Luigi is hiring.”

  “I’m going to make caskets?”

  “Is what you’re doing now so much better?” She sneezed.

  “I work three jobs. I cook at the tavern on the weekends. And nights I’m on the docks, unloading olive oil, tobacco. You want me to give that up?”

  She said nothing.

  “Soon when the war is over, you might have to come stay with me, sorella. Might have to come live with me in the North End, no matter how much you don’t want to.”

  “Is the war going to be over?”

  “Haven’t you heard? The Germans are about to lose the battle of attrition because the flu is killing more of them than the British and French.”

  “The flu is on our side?” Gina said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “The Germans are stronger and better trained. The strong die first.”

  “That’s absurd!”

  Salvo left after three days, after fifty of Mimoo’s friends came to bring Gina platters of food. She had nowhere to put any of it. On the plus side, she didn’t have to worry about shopping, buying, money, cooking.

  On the minus side she had no appetite.

  The weather didn’t get better.

  Gina didn’t get better either. Many mornings she couldn’t get out of bed. “It’s normal,” said Rita, who looked in on her. “You just lost your mother. Why would anyone want to get out of bed after that?”

  That was true. Gina agreed. But this physical malaise was not normal: the low-grade fever, the lack of interest in food, the whole-body dire exhaustion.

  Salvo paid her November rent.

  And then Rita got a low-grade fever and stopped working. She stumbled down the stairs one evening and said she was taking herself to the hospital because her chest was hurting like there was a baby in it trying to get out. Gina didn’t see Rita again. Two days later, Father O’Reilly buried Rita.

  Gina was so afraid. She couldn’t take another day of fever and vomiting. She decided not to go to the hospital. Was it just her imagination, or did everyone who went to the hospital die there? As she dragged her body along Randall Street on the way to their family physician, she overheard two men smoking cigars and chatting on the street corner telling each other about their elderly fathers throwing up. As she walked past them too weak to button her overcoat, she thought, Is that what I am, elderly? I’m throwing up because I’ve gotten so old?

  Her doctor, with the alliterative and endearing name of Clifford Clyde, examined her but blessedly did not appear to be as panicked as she was. She was embarrassed because as always she couldn’t remember which name was his first and which his last. Clifford or Clyde. She kept getting confused even after the receptionist behind the desk told her.

  “My mother just died of the flu,” Gina said, and started to cry.

  “Yes, I know. I’m very sorry about Mimoo,” said Clyde Clifford Clyde. “But I’m not sure that’s what’s troubling you. Is your husband sick?”

  “I don’t know. He’s in prison.”

  “Again?” Through a stethoscope the doctor listened to her breathe. “He sure likes it there, doesn’t he?”

  “Well, there he doesn’t have to worry about paying the rent,” said Gina. Is that what happened to people who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth? Once the spoon is taken away, they don’t know how to feed themselves.

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Two weeks ago at the jail.”

  “No. I mean . . .”

  “Oh. August. He was convicted in September.”

  Gina didn’t want to tell the doctor that after their blistering August attack on each other, Harry had left Lawrence and stayed in Boston for three weeks until his trial date. And when his bail was denied, he was remanded to the medium security at Concord to await sentencing. She kept silent. “He told me not to come visit him because of the flu.”

  “He is very wise, your husband,” Clifford Clyde Clifford said, pulling up her sleeve to draw some blood. “I’ll have to take it to the lab,” he told her when he was done. “Your blood pressure is too high, you’re flushed. You’re not normal.”

  “I know. I told you. How long before the results are in?”

  “A few days. A week at most.”

  Gina stopped by two days later just in case the results had come in early. It was the middle of the day and the office was closed. Perhaps it was because of the snow. But there was a sign on the door telling her the doctor had died.

  The doctor had died! Clifford Clyde. Died? What an anomaly!

  The following day the receptionist was back at the desk, but no one could find Gina’s lab results or even her chart. There was a new doctor, younger. She didn’t even bother to ask for his name. He also took blood from her and told her to call in seven days for the results.

  “The last doctor who told me that stood where you’re standing today,” Gina said. “And when I called two days later, he was dead.”

  “Do you think that was because of your blood work?” The doctor was deadpan. “Or because you didn’t wait the requisite days?”

  She stared at him blankly.

  “I’ll tell you right now what’s the matter with you, if you want.”

  She held on to the arm of the patient’s chair for strength.

  “You most likely have the flu,” he said.

  She started to cry.

  “Also, you’re expecting a child.”

  “I’m what?” Swiping at her face, she slipped down to the medical gurney and dully watched his impassive face. “That can’t be.”

  “Which part, the flu, or . . . are you married?”

  “Well, yes . . .”


  “So it can be.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “That really is too old to have a baby. Why did you wait so long?”

  “I didn’t wait,” she said weakly. “We had trouble.”

  “Conceiving or keeping?”

  “Keeping.”

  He nodded. “Do your best with this one. Where is your husband?”

  “Prison.”

  The doctor was quiet, not knowing what to say. Gina didn’t help him find a way.

  After leaving his office, she walked stoically back home through the freezing mud. How long would it take this time? They had blamed the Bread and Roses strike for their failures, Big Bill, sick people at Rose’s Home, the Russian Revolution.

  Who were they going to blame now? The Spanish?

  Eight

  GINA DIDN’T LEAVE THE house the next day. She simply didn’t know how she would ever get up again or why she would want to. She had food she wasn’t eating and Salvo had paid her rent. She would worry about December’s rent in three weeks. But in the evening, the young doctor knocked on her door. She was too weak to go out and greet him. From the couch she motioned to him to come in.

  “You don’t look good,” he said, sitting down at her kitchen table. He covered his mouth.

  “You don’t think? But I’m feeling so spry.”

  “I want to help you.”

  The lonely lamp on the end table burned dim. She didn’t want to run out of kerosene oil because she had no money to get more.

  “What am I going to do?” she said. “My mother died. I’m alone. I can’t work, I have no money. My husband is in prison. And you just told me I’m having a baby.”

  “I told you because you are. I’m only the messenger.”

  “What am I going to do? How am I going to work and stay pregnant? How am I going to pay the rent? How am I going to take care of this baby?” She was weeping.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, almost but not quite reaching out to pat her for comfort. “Don’t worry about those things. The baby brings his own food. That’s what the Persians say. I spent some time in Tehran.”

  “The baby brings his own food,” she repeated like a distant echo. “That’s what my mother once said. And she’d never been to Tehran.”

  “She must have been wise. But this thing that’s going around is really dangerous for young people like you.”

  “I thought you said I wasn’t young?” She waved away his protest. “And yet my elderly mother is dead,” she said, wiping her face. “Go figure.”

  “I didn’t say it’s not dangerous for older people. I said it’s most dangerous for young people with strong immune systems. It’s counter-intuitive, I know. But, and this is what I came to say, it’s most dangerous for pregnant women.”

  “Why? Do pregnant women have strong immune systems?”

  “Yes. Something happens to the body when it’s fighting for two. It becomes like a warrior. The viral response rises in proportion. It’s called a cytokine storm. Have you heard of that? No? Well, you’re doubly vulnerable.”

  “Okay,” she said. Cytokine storms, violet catastrophes. How did they come up with these pithy phrases to signify her implosion? She didn’t want to speak aloud about how few wan illusions she held about this pregnancy. “What do you recommend?”

  “Leave. Go someplace else. It’s terrible here, this freezing rain, the drafts, the wind.”

  “Go where? Like a quarantine?”

  “Exactly like a quarantine. But to protect you.”

  Gina almost laughed. If she had the strength, she would have. “Would that I had a place I could disappear to and gestate in privacy.”

  “You’ve got to do something. You and your baby are in mortal danger. Don’t you want to save yourself, save your child?”

  Gina blinked. “I’ve got nowhere to go,” she inaudibly mouthed. “I barely have a husband.”

  She fell back on the couch after the doctor left. It was as if the good Lord came knocking on the door of her heart and said, you wanted it like this? Like this it is. When you were young, you kept praying to me over and over, Dear God, the only thing I want is him. You asked, and so you have been given.

  The only thing you have is him.

  Nine

  SHE HAD MISSED THREE Sundays of going down to Concord to visit Harry. Last time she had gone was just after her mother died. The first thing he said to her this time was, “Are you sick?”

  “No, I’m fine,” she lied. She didn’t want him to forbid her again to come see him. She wasn’t going to listen to him anyway, but she didn’t want to hear it.

  “Oh. Because we’ve had a hundred unexplained deaths here. Big strong guys get a fever and three days later drop dead.”

  “I don’t have a fever.” Yet her malaise was unmistakable.

  Harry seemed shocked by her haunted appearance.

  “You look terrible,” he said. “You’ve lost so much weight, and you’re deathly pale. You must be sick.”

  They sat behind a table with no glass between them, just a wire cage. He moved slightly back. He looked like he might want to cover his mouth from her.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, chewing her lip. To look away from him, she glanced around at other families, other couples. The men who were not Harry were eagerly talking to their women, holding their hands through the steel diamonds of intimacy.

  “Gina, have you heard? They took Jack Reed’s papers! The man went to Russia, recorded every minute he spent there in his journals, and they took them.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The Department of Justice.”

  “Really.” She studied her short, unpolished nails, her fingers empty of rings. “Didn’t they just give them back? I read something . . .”

  “That’s not the point. They had them for six months. Why would they take his personal notes? They’ll stop at nothing! Department of Justice, indeed. All in the name of war. Have you heard your Emma on this?”

  “No.”

  “She said that the military spirit is the most merciless, heartless, and brutal in existence. There’s not even a pretense of justification for it.”

  “Such a firecracker, that woman.” When was the last time Gina had red polish on her nails? Could it be two years ago? Three? God! Well, who could afford nail polish now? She didn’t care. Just something to think about. To not think about the unthinkable things. To hear him less well.

  “The soldier, to quote Tolstoy, is a professional man-killer,” Harry was saying. “He is a cold-blooded, mechanical tool of his military superiors. He is ready to cut throats at the first command of his ranking officer.”

  “Not all soldiers.”

  Harry was barely listening to her. “I believe that militarism,” he said, “a standing army and navy in any country is indicative of the decay of liberty and the destruction of all that is finest in any nation.”

  That she heard. Finally she raised her head away from her white hands. “Does Russia have an army and a navy?”

  “What?” He was as surprised she had asked him a question as she was by asking it.

  “Does Russia have a standing army?” Gina repeated. “Does she have soldiers?”

  “Out of necessity. What’s your point?”

  “That some wars are justified.”

  “Not this war.”

  “But other wars? Perhaps wars not yet fought? Or wars fought by countries other than this country?”

  He grimaced. “What are you talking about? It’s self-defense for Russia. They would never use their army to invade their neighbors, to attack a country thousands of miles away, to use another country for its natural resources. They just gave away most of their empire for peace.”

  “Ironic, that’s what Goldman says.” She had stopped being on first-name terms with Emma Goldman long ago.

  “Yes, she and I both oppose the American nation soon being able
to hurl dynamite bombs upon defenseless enemies from flying machines.”

  Gina looked down again, into the lines of her palms. There were some people who were palm readers. Gypsies maybe? Some old withered Sicilians. Were there any on the streets of sleepy Concord? It was so quiet here, so nice. She had forgotten how tranquil. Maybe she could move here now. If she weren’t incinta, she could move into Rose’s Home for the desperately afflicted. How was she ever going to tell Harry what was going on with her?

  “This country’s ship is down, Gina, it’s floating sideways. We have to set it right.”

  “We?”

  “Why are you judging me?”

  “Did I say anything? Did I lay down one accusation?”

  “Your averted eyes say it all.”

  “Harry, assaulting a police officer is not setting the ship right. That’s also violence. Which you say you oppose.”

  “He was an instrument of the state. He was violating my civil rights. I was protesting an illegal war, trying to dissuade innocent ignorant boys from joining the armed forces. And he was trying to get them to join. He was basking in their ignorance.”

  “Got it. It’s selective violence you oppose.”

  “What would make any young man join the army, especially for a war that is so pointless, so useless, so illegal, is just beyond me!” Harry had worked himself up into quite a lather.

  She struggled up. How could she tell him? What was the point? He was stuck in here, mired in his militancy unabated, and she was stuck out there, clutching like she was drowning to the thin, living branch extended to her, yet swallowed by La Pesadilla.

  He couldn’t get out.

  And she couldn’t carry to term anyway. She left without telling him a thing except as an afterthought when she said over her shoulder, “Oh, you didn’t hear? I would’ve thought for sure they’d tell you. War is over. Armistice Day was November 11. The flu has defeated the Germans. They conditionally surrendered. Until they get better, I suppose. Well, goodbye. See you next week, I hope.”