Bellagrand

by Paullina Simons

  “Is this how it always is?” Harry asked. “He just sprints by and they give him things?”

  “Well, just look at him,” Gina said, a vision herself, elegant and chestnut-haired in her flowing frock, her lady’s silk hat, her arm through Harry’s.

  “I know what he looks like. But why do they care?”

  Gina squeezed Harry’s arm. “You don’t want other people to notice your boy, mio amore?”

  “I don’t know why they would, that’s all. Alexander! Not so far ahead! Stay close.”

  With amusement Gina notes Harry’s peevish expression. Alexander hugs a woman Harry doesn’t know. Harry frowns. This woman, like the boy is her boy, gives him a truck and crayons and a chocolate bar. Harry frowns. He asks if there is anyone, anyone at all, whom Alexander doesn’t instantly take to. Gina replies there is not. She can’t drum into him the concept of strangers. Harry says churlishly that to Alexander every stranger is a friend whose name he doesn’t yet know.

  “I find it delightful,” she says.

  “You would,” says Harry. “Because you put him on a purple pedestal the day he was born, and since that day, the rest of us live at his feet.”

  “And this upsets you why?”

  “Look!”

  Alexander runs and jumps into the arms of a flashy man in a smart suit. Harry frowns, opens his mouth, is about to yell when—

  “Oh, hello, Salvo.”

  It was Salvo’s jewelry-adorned neck Alexander was hanging off like a marmoset. In 1922, Salvo had become almost unrecognizable. Having made wagonloads of money off his real estate commissions, enough for three cars, a brand-new house, a boat, and a minority interest in the recently opened Cuban–Italian restaurant, Salvo walked around the Tequesta grounds like he was part owner of the entire town, not just a little dive off the docks. He didn’t look or act like the man who merely supplied the money and the expertise in making pizza, while someone else counted the profits and rolled the dough. He looked like a man in control of everything, including his destiny.

  Gina bought Alexander and herself some ice cream. The men abstained. The four of them strolled under the moss oaks along the overgrown tropical paths near the marina.

  “So how does it feel, my brother?” Salvo asked Harry, slapping his back. “To be free to walk among us, hordes and commoners?”

  “Overrated.”

  Salvo laughed.

  “Come on, Alexander, get down,” Harry said. “You’re dripping ice cream on Uncle Salvo’s nice suit.”

  “I don’t mind.” Salvo abundantly kissed his sticky nephew. “Right, crackerjack? You’re the only boy related to me by blood. Drip your messes on me. I carry two extra white shirts in my car for just this purpose.”

  Alexander stuck his ice cream cone into Salvo’s cheek, laughed, and kissed the cheek through the creamy spot of ice cream. “Do you want me to do that to you, too, Daddy?”

  “No, thank you, son.”

  Gina’s smile didn’t leave her face as she watched the three men she loved most.

  The sky is cloudless blue, the sun super bright, even in February. It’s all so simple, so easy. Gina walks on and watches it all, a watercolor onto which rain is falling.

  Two

  JANKE WAS GONE from their life a month before Harry broached things.

  They were down by the dock around his mosaic table, eating waffles and strawberries, the quiet water balmy and beautiful. Fernando was somewhere unseen playing “La Bruja” on his Spanish guitar. He played it for Gina because he knew she liked it. Now that Harry was a free man, Fernando came off Herman’s security payroll, but Harry and Gina decided to keep him on as their driver (and troubadour), and invited him to live in the mews rent-free. Gina was so relieved when Fernando agreed. Alexander loved him and his Spanish strings. She didn’t want one more person to vanish unmarked from her boy’s life. Although Esther hadn’t made it through Christmas before she called to speak to Alexander. “I told you, she wouldn’t be able to stay angry for long,” Harry said. “She can’t be apart from that boy. He is our secret weapon.”

  Do we need a weapon? Gina wanted to ask.

  Having finished his breakfast, Harry was threading worms on hooks, ready to go fishing with Alexander. “So what do you think?” he asked her. “What should we do?”

  “We?” She smiled. “Salvo promised to come for lunch. I’m going to make quesadillas and mend half of Alexander’s wardrobe. We swim. We live. Just like before.”

  “I meant us. What is our plan for life, for you and me, for Alexander?”

  “Do we have to have a plan?”

  “That’s like asking do we have to have a future.”

  “Well, mio marito,” Gina said, “you were telling Janke for three years how you were getting yourself ready for this moment, so that when it came you’d be ready.” She smiled at him lovingly. “Are you ready?”

  “Are you?”

  A moment drifted by. “Let’s open a bookstore,” she said. “The town is sorely in need of one.”

  “That town is in need of a bookstore?” Harry made a face. “Do they even know how to read?”

  “Oh, nice,” she said. “Since when did you become such a bourgeois snob? I thought you were one of the people. Go be one of them. Sell them oranges and books.”

  “You want me to open and run a business.” He sounded incredulous.

  “A bookstore, Harry. The best kind of business besides a pizza joint.”

  Harry shook his head.

  “You’d rather work for someone else?”

  “That also doesn’t please me. I don’t like to take orders.”

  “Everyone has to take orders from someone, amore mio. Even the communists take orders.”

  “I can’t be a communist, I’m on probation.” They stared at each other. “I’m joking.” He strummed the fishing lines like guitar strings. “Where’s your sense of humor?”

  “I don’t know why you’re against a bookstore,” Gina said. “It’ll just be you and me. You won’t have to hire anyone else, so you won’t exploit them. Just me.” She smiled. “And I want to be exploited.”

  “Okay, it’s still the middle of the morning. Don’t get naughty. Though . . .” He put down the hooks and the lines, leaned over and kissed her, kissed her so deeply that the small metal chair tipped backward. She yelped.

  “But back to the bookstore,” he said, straightening her out, “if we’re even a little bit successful, we’ll have to hire someone else, won’t we?”

  “Oh, Harry, caro mio. We’ll make absolutely sure we’re not successful. We’ll vow right now not to make a single dollar in profit on our little shop of books.”

  He carried his fishing lines to the dock. “I won’t be taunted by you.”

  She followed him. “I’m not taunting, delitto. I’m teasing.”

  “Well, all your teasing dreams are premised on our staying in Bellagrand.”

  When he glanced back at her, she had paled.

  “I’m not taunting, delitta,” he said. “I’m teasing.”

  They stopped talking about everything but Alexander and what food to eat. March windswept silently into April. Ever warmer, the days remained blessedly dry. She wondered what Harry was waiting for, until one morning she overheard him on the telephone with his sister, saying, “Well, how soon? It’s been months. What’s taking so long?” There was silence while Esther spoke. “How long is this damn probate going to last?”

  He was waiting for the deed to be transferred from the trust into his own name. Gina watched his back as she cut up the lemons for lemonade. But why? What did that matter to how they lived?

  After he got off the telephone, she wanted to ask, but he became buried in a newspaper. She glanced at what he was so absorbed in. The Germans and the Russians had made a secret deal flouting the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations. Both foreign ministers said it was just an economic development agreement. Everyone knew it was code for a military alliance.

  “Why are
you asking Esther about the probate?”

  “Just curious.” He wouldn’t lift his head.

  She wanted to swipe the paper from him. For days on end he wouldn’t get his nose out of it. He read it like other people read the Bible.

  “What do you want me to tell you?” he said, pushing her elbow slightly away from his head. “Right now I might want to be left alone.” The Allied nations were uniting against Russia: no diplomatic recognition until it paid off the debt it repudiated four years earlier.

  “Did they leave you alone in prison?” Gina asked, nudging him, standing close, leaning over him, resenting the damn news.

  “I always enjoy your apt comparisons.”

  “What about all your lofty interlocutions to Janke? Were they just for show?”

  “No. What interlocutions? Oh. Work? Yes, I was trying to manage her.”

  “Like you’re managing me right now?”

  “Not very well, am I?”

  “Why probate? What do you care? You said you didn’t. So why?”

  He said nothing. He was engrossed in Russia’s war debt. Perhaps he hadn’t even heard her.

  “Harry!”

  “Oh no . . .” He put his hands on the paper, and finally looked up at her with weary, affectionate eyes. “Gina,” he said mildly. “Let’s make a bargain. I can finish my paper, and then I’ll take you to lunch in town, and we’ll have a proper conversation. Where would you like to go? The Breakers? Would you like to drive down to Palm Beach?”

  “Alexander is showing houses with Salvo this afternoon,” she said, “but Salvo has plans at three so he has to drop him off. Maybe Palm Beach another time? When we can make a whole day of it.”

  “Okay. Today we’ll go to Seaside. Now, may I finish the one little article that I’ve been trying to finish for the last twenty minutes?”

  He took her to an early lunch on the harbor at Seaside, a local popular seafood joint.

  She made small talk. Did you see that the herons have just given birth to their young?

  He replied that he saw them.

  Did you like the dolphins at dawn this morning? They finally reappeared in the ocean. Summer is close.

  Yes, he said. It was nice to walk so early in the morning on the empty beach and see them frolic.

  But finally, not small talk.

  “You know,” he said, “with the probate almost over, the papers we’ve been waiting for are finally being drawn up. They’re going to be with us next week. The papers for the beneficiary transfer. We’ll go to the bank together. I’ve asked Jenkins to put both our names on the deed. So that Bellagrand can belong fully and equally to both of us.”

  “That’s good. Who is Jenkins?”

  “Trevor Jenkins, the bank manager.”

  “Oh.”

  He took her hand. “Does that make you happy?”

  What was the correct response? “Yes, Harry, il mio unico delitto,” she said. “It does.”

  She was waiting, waiting, waiting . . .

  “What if I told you I wanted to go back to university to finish my doctorate?” he asked over the shrimp ceviche appetizer.

  There it was. Gina looked thoughtfully into her soda. “I didn’t know there was a university in Jupiter,” she said. “I thought the closest one was in Miami.”

  “Not Miami. Cambridge.”

  She wanted to focus on him, but could not. Her vision had blurred. She continued to stare into her soda. “Harvard?”

  “Gia, look at me.”

  Somehow she looked. He took her hand, as if he were proposing marriage. Only the kneeling was missing. “What if I told you I wanted to move back to Boston?”

  She couldn’t speak for a moment because she couldn’t catch a breath, as if her lungs had deflated. And there she had thought it was a choice of vocation that had been at issue! Alas. She had mischaracterized the thorny subject by one crucial letter.

  He continued to hold her hands across the white tablecloth. “Don’t get upset. Hear me out first.”

  “Hear you out, then get upset?”

  “What if we moved back and bought a mansion in Beacon Hill? You’ve always wanted to live there. Where the fancy people live.” Harry smiled. “Alexander could play on the Boston Common every day.”

  She pulled her hands away. She used all her Protestant training not to rip them away. “I dreamed about Beacon Hill,” she said, careful not to raise her voice, “long ago. Before I had laid my eyes on Bellagrand. You know I don’t want to live anywhere else.”

  “Come on,” said Harry. “You’ve always been a city girl.” He tilted his head, full of easy charm. “You’d be so beautiful in your day frocks and court shoes, your pillbox hats and long silk gloves. You could join the Daughters of the Revolution. You could get a job at the Boston Library in Back Bay. Give historic tours of Beacon Hill. Tell me you wouldn’t want that.” He spoke as if dreaming the dream for her.

  “Oh, so I’d work.”

  “No, no. You could go back to school, too. Get your degree from Simmons. I know how much you once wanted that. I can give that back to you, what I took from you. Maybe you could become a teacher.”

  She tried not to move a facial muscle. “What would we live on?”

  Raising his hand, he pointed across the shining waters. “Same thing we’re living on now. Bellagrand.”

  She was mute.

  “We’d have two houses?”

  “We’d sell this one.”

  Her throat hardened like concrete. She could barely shake her head. She still couldn’t breathe.

  “Sell it,” he continued, as if not seeing her distress, “and with the money we’d make from it, we’d move back to Boston and live like royalty on Mt. Vernon Street.”

  All her effort went toward shallow panting. “The deed is not even in our names yet,” she managed to croak. “The ink is still in the inkwell for our signatures. And you already want to sell it?”

  “If it’s to return to Boston like conquerors.”

  She tried to take a gulp of air, but couldn’t.

  Harry grabbed her trembling hands. “Listen to me, my beloved wife. I want you to have the urban life you dreamed of.”

  She tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let her. “I have the life I want.”

  “Do you have any idea how much this house must be worth? We haven’t had it properly appraised, as my father advised. But we’ll do it now. Salvo can help us. When Flagler built it, it was worth a pretty penny. But now? Gia, my father was right, we could be sitting on a field of gold!”

  “Is it a potter’s field?” She wouldn’t raise her eyes to him.

  “A what?”

  “Never mind.” She admired his enthusiasm, but why was it invariably that his excitement meant a diminished life in her? Why did a numbness pour over her, like coldly moving lava? Why was she terrorized instead of enthralled? She shook her head. “Harold, I don’t want to sell Bellagrand.”

  He let go of her, sat back. “Did you just call me Harold?”

  “That’s your name, isn’t it? I’m not changing your name, am I?” Like I had changed mine. Even God wouldn’t recognize me, wouldn’t find me anymore.

  “You want to continue living here, as we have been?”

  “That’s all I want.”

  “But I want to go back to Boston,” he said. “I want to get my doctorate at Harvard. And Gina—I’d like to be closer to my sister. She is the only family I have left.”

  “I want to be close to my brother,” Gina said. “He’s the only family I have left.” She couldn’t tell Harry that she and Esther were not on speaking terms and might never be again. What had transpired between them felt unfixable.

  “I know she’s been difficult with you. She’s reeling. It’s hard for her without my father in the house. And she desperately misses Alexander. Your brother is a vagabond. He moved here on a whim, he’ll move back on a whim. Come on, be reasonable. My sister is never leaving Boston, and we’re all she has. She wants us close. Alexan
der especially.”

  “Alexander only.”

  “Okay.”

  “Alexander also benefits from being close to his zio.” Cucumber sandwiches, seafood salad, crab soup, barely eaten, barely looked at. “Esther can come stay with us here whenever she wants,” Gina said. “As before.”

  “It’s not the same. You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”

  “You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”

  “But we already lived your way for more than three years, Gia. Can’t we now try my way?”

  “We lived your way for fourteen years.” Did she really need to remind him of it?

  He mock-laughed. “Lawrence was my way?”

  “Of course,” she replied calmly. “Who else’s? Mine?”

  “Okay, okay. But can’t we now live the other life you wanted?”

  She shook her head.

  “I am a Bostonian,” Harry said. “Maybe you can be transplanted like a mangrove, but not me.”

  “I’m not a mangrove,” Gina said. “I’m an immigrant. I have already transplanted myself. I’ve already remade myself into something new. An American.”

  “I’m an American, but I’m not going to be a Floridian. This is always going to feel second best to me. It’s never going to feel like home. Why can’t you understand that?”

  Gina looked out across the water. Somewhere on the other shore stood their house. If she squinted, she could almost make out its white stucco walls.

  “Why sell it?” she asked. “Why can’t we just continue borrowing against it, as we’ve been doing?”

  “How can we be free with a noose like that around our necks?”

  “Bellagrand is not a noose,” Gina said. “She is freedom.” She looked away. She didn’t want him to see her expression—as if she didn’t know him. How could he feel so starkly different than she did about Bellagrand?

  “Allow me to disagree with you,” he said, “having just done time inside her fortress walls. Besides, do you remember what Esther told us? Eventually we’d have to pay back the money or sell the house. We won’t be able to keep borrowing indefinitely.”