Bellagrand: A Novel Read online

  Harry looks down at the table, then up at the hands of the clock above Gina’s head. “I don’t know where she was,” he says, his eyes opaque. “Not with us.”

  When it is time to go, she stands with the books to be returned in one hand.

  “Lean forward,” he says. She obeys. Harry glances behind her at Roy, reaches out and strokes her cheek, her hair, cups her face. Gina presses his fingers against her lips as they pass over her mouth.

  “I’ll see you next Sunday, il mio delitto.”

  “I’ll see you next Sunday, my wife.”

  Chapter 4

  THE LOVE OF AN AMERICAN GIRL

  One

  I ADORE THIS HOUSE,” Rose was saying to Gina about the Wayside. “Sometimes I half-wish it were still mine, still in my family. I told everyone we sold it because we couldn’t stand living in it after my son died, but the truth is, George couldn’t keep up with the mortgage payments, no matter how hard he worked. We had to sell it.”

  Gina listened half-attentively, one spiritual part of her listening, one mechanical part washing the floor, and one female part lamenting the sorry state of her dress.

  The last part was the loudest of all.

  “Did he”—she thought hard to recall Rose’s words—“work hard?” Her question less to do with Rose than with her own self, her own life.

  “Yes. He was a professor, he corrected other people’s manuscripts on the side, he edited books, he wrote columns. He was a genius, and he never stopped working. But it just wasn’t enough for this summer home and a place in Boston.” Rose sighed and crossed herself. “It’s better this way. I chose this—not just to serve the poor, but to be of the poor. And I’m still here in my beloved Wayside, where I can sleep and yet continue to do the work of the Lord.” Rose gazed at Gina, scrutinized her. “In my past life when I thought I also could be a writer, like my father, I penned a story called ‘The Love of an American Girl.’ Have you heard of it?”

  With her bare hands Gina was wringing the mop of all debris, filth, waste, medicines. “I haven’t heard of it, no.”

  Rose followed her outside while Gina changed the water in the bucket. “Not many people have. I’m not my father, I soon learned. I don’t have his gifts. In any case, in my story, the heroine is dazzling and full of virtue. But the crux of any story is to know when one is loved.” Rose paused. Waited. When there was no response from Gina, she nudged further. “Don’t you agree?”

  “I don’t know,” Gina said, full of hesitation. “What if one thinks one is loved, but one is not?”

  “I think what often happens,” Rose said, “is one is loved differently from the way one expects, and it’s this false judgment and subsequent disillusion that leads to so much trouble in life. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Gina didn’t answer. What Rose was saying didn’t apply either to her physical activity or to her spiritual distance. She was rushing to finish mopping because she wanted desperately to change her dress before she had to cook and serve lunch and Ben came.

  At 11 a.m. every day the bell rang five times in the tiny makeshift chapel to commemorate the five wounds of the Lord, followed by an hour of silence, during which Gina washed and cleaned and prepared food for the sick. Psalms were recited before and after meals, starting with Psalm 1, ending with Psalm 150, repeating every three days.

  Have mercy on me, o God, and hide thy face from my sins.

  “Gina, you know how I feel about you,” Rose was saying. “You are like a divine child. But you also know how I feel about the work we do. It’s uncompromising. And I’m unyielding when it comes to maintaining a very high level of servitude. The sicker our patients, the poorer and more wretched, the more I expect from the women who minister to them.”

  “I know that, Rose.”

  “I cannot force anyone to be good, it is not my inclination nor my desire. But any hint of laziness, frivolity, or self-indulgence and I must ask them to seek service elsewhere.”

  Gina tried hard not to bow her head. “I understand.”

  Rose kissed her. “Do you remember you once told me you were too fond of dancing and ice cream to be a nun?”

  “I don’t remember saying that.” It did sound like her, though.

  Rose smiled. “Do you still feel that way?”

  Gina frowned, slightly puzzled. “I’m married, Rose. I can hardly become a nun now.”

  “Are you too fond of dancing and ice cream to be a wife?”

  Letting go of Rose’s hands, Gina stepped away. She tried not to stagger away. “No. But I must run, I have much to do.”

  “This may surprise you to hear, Gina, but I myself am not a merciful woman.” Rose crossed herself. “What I do is bountifully preach mercy.” She paused. “And by mercy I don’t mean forgiveness. I mean care for life’s poorest of the poor and its most abandoned.”

  He drew me out of deep waters, He brought me out into a spacious place, He rescued me because He delighted in me according to the cleanness of my hands in His sight.

  Rose’s patients were the poorest of the poor, life’s most abandoned. At death’s door, they required nothing more than compassion and kindness. They were kept clean to the best of the nuns’ abilities. Rose insisted that whatever one may have felt about the state of the sick, the only face one was allowed to show them was one of mercy and goodness, because that was what the dying required. But sometimes even the priests who came to administer last rites or to offer Communion would turn their heads and vomit before they continued to walk between the beds, so overpowering were the physical conditions that surrounded the sick.

  For many months Gina had immersed herself in the works of God, as an offering, as repentance, praying for Harry to be released early, for a baby to bless their life, for a bit more money, to struggle less, to want less, to be happier. But something happened to her after Ben returned to her life. Whereas before, all she had noted about herself was her inner life, she was now made unduly conscious of the outer Gina. The woman who sewed her own clothes, who had once saved money for silk and chiffon, for lace gloves, for patent leather shoes, for bobbles and beads, gave herself a withering once-over and concluded that no woman who worked in a ward of humans that made priests retch and men faint could make herself outwardly attractive to anyone. Holiness was wonderful but did nothing for vanity. Holiness was beautiful but not externally.

  Yet Ben came. He came like the professed, the novices, and the postulants. He came wearing his most dispensable clothing, calling himself Gina’s orderly. Sometimes he drove up to Concord so early on Saturday morning, he got to the Wayside even before Gina. He was always full of good cheer and happy stories of Panamanian feasts and fevers. He worked side by side with her among the oppressed, carrying her pails of dirty water, searching for potatoes in the earth, taking her to a market in Lexington so she could buy vegetables and bread for dinner. He never fainted and he never retched. When one day she asked him how he did it, how he stopped himself from reacting to what even the men of the cloth could not ignore, he said he had seen things in Panama, lived through things in Panama that had given him a permanently altered outlook on life.

  “I’m not a debutante, Gina,” he said.

  “Me either.”

  “That I know. But even Alice, who was one, was not one. Do you know what I mean?”

  Ben often brought up Alice. As if he were trying to make Gina feel better about the road her life had taken.

  “Marriage must be socially and economically endogamous,” Ben said. They were cleaning the soiled pails outside in the cold brook at the back of the house.

  “Excuse me? Are you allowed to say that word to women?”

  He laughed. He laughed often and openly when he was with her. “It means marrying only within one’s own social stratum. Alice, released from the burden of that suffocating duty by Harry’s rejection, found herself a man and a life much better suited to her.”

  “A Texan?”

  “A rancher, yes. He traveled north to her lumber
mill to buy a quality haul for his ranch in Abilene. She advised him on what kind and how much. A month later he was back. He said he needed more for his stables and paddocks. She advised him on what kind and how much. A month later he was back for lumber for his rodeo. Apparently it was all too subtle for Alice. Finally he asked her to travel south with him—with her mother as chaperone, of course—so she could advise him a little more specifically.” Ben laughed. “At the wedding reception, he told everyone he nearly bankrupted his father’s business pretending to procure enough lumber until the girl of his dreams married him.”

  Gina still could not believe it. “How could Alice, the women’s club, parlor lounge, piano-playing, drawing-room social debutante, marry a horseman from Texas?”

  “Some pairings make no sense to the outside world, it’s true.”

  Gina turned red and away. Harry was a dreamer, a reader. He was all head and no hands. He was unsturdy, un-Italian, but so American. It’s what she loved most about him outside of their bed.

  Ben continued. “The outdoors was always what Alice loved best. So she chose a life that had most of what she loved in it. Wide open spaces, horses, and a man who worked all day with his hands.”

  Gina was thoughtful, listening, pondering, daydreaming, even as Ben was talking.

  “Excuse me, what?”

  “What do you think?” Ben asked. “Do you have a life that has most of what you love in it?”

  “I don’t know.” She mulled it over. “I don’t own a lumber yard like Alice, so I don’t keep a ledger of such things. My life has many things that I love in it.” But her brow tightened across her strong forehead, a darkness shadowed her happy eyes. She wanted to push the curls away from her perspiring face, but her hands weren’t clean. She would not admit to Ben that her life had things she did not like in it. Lawrence. Missing pennies. Missing husband. And it sorely and gapingly lacked the one thing she wanted most. A tiny child so she could be a mother.

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Is Panama what you love most?”

  Ben shrugged as if he didn’t want to answer, didn’t want to tell her the truth. “The work is what I love the most. I might like Panama better if it were a suburb of Boston and didn’t give me muscle tremors, a vicious rash, and life-ending fevers.”

  “Yes, that’s hardly appealing.”

  “A suburb of Boston,” Ben added slowly, “perhaps like Concord.”

  The valleys of the sea were exposed and the foundations of the earth laid bare at the blast of breath, O Lord, from your nostrils.

  At the Massachusetts Correctional, Gina wants to tell Harry about Alice, about the horses and the prairie, but doesn’t know how to bring up or explain the provenance of this newfound knowledge. So she doesn’t.

  She wants to ask Harry if his life contains most of what he loves in it, but she doesn’t know how to ask. It seems cruel to ask him this while he chafes in prison, thin, drawn, pale, with a distant look in his rainy gray eyes, a man physically there but a million miles away in his soul. She wants to ask him where he wants to be, but doesn’t dare. She is afraid. What if his answer is, not with you? Because she is right here, yet his eyes are glazed, as if they’re recalling another time, another place.

  She thinks this as they sit. But what he says to her confounds her, makes her doubt her own perception of everything.

  “What’s wrong with you? Why do you seem as if you’re a million miles away?” asks Harry.

  “I’m here, tesoro,” she hastens to assure him, her eyes clearing, smiling at him. “Right here.”

  She hands him the newspaper and watches him as he leafs through it.

  “In 1911,” Harry says, “Max Eastman was asked to help restore a nearly defunct political magazine. He turned it around, and is now releasing an issue a month. You should take a look at it. It’s called The Masses.”

  “Why would I want to take a look at it?”

  “It’s good. It’s political. It’s funny. John Reed, Sherwood Anderson, Lincoln Steffens write for it.”

  She waits. She knows him well, she knows more is coming.

  “In Paterson,” he goes on, “I wrote some speeches and articles for the strike pamphlets. Max liked them. He said I had a gift. This week I got a letter from him. He said when I get out he’d like to get me on board. As an editor or a writer. Better than working for Bill, no? From your perspective, I mean.”

  From her perspective, Gina sits on the side of the table from which, come two o’clock, she can get up, walk through the doors and out into the blinding sunshine. That’s her perspective. She can take a bus and go to the sea, she can buy gloves, listen to the radio, drink a cold beer, go to the library to borrow a book and to the butcher to buy a sausage. She can take a train to anywhere in the country.

  “Yes,” Gina says. “From my perspective anything is better than working for Big Bill.”

  “Anything?” He smiles. She wonders what else he’s got in store for her. Instead of telling her, he lowers his head into the newspaper, and reads to her stories woven from fine print as she listens and watches him.

  “Why do you read so much?” she asks in the lull. “What are you looking for?”

  “The meaning of life,” he replies. “Isn’t that what everyone is looking for? Isn’t that what you’re looking for?”

  Gina doesn’t reply. She wants to tell him that she thought she had found hers, but doesn’t. Until she becomes a mother, she can no longer answer. Immigrants don’t usually ask themselves these questions. They haven’t the time. Yet her father who brought her to America by the sheer force of his longing and his passion demands nothing less from her. For her dead father she will ask herself this question over and over until the answer comes to her by the awful grace of God.

  “Like many men,” Harry says, “Henry David Thoreau included, I wish to discover the essential parts of life.”

  “Me too,” says Gina.

  “I don’t want to miss them while I’m toiling like the worker bees in the mills.”

  Is there much danger of that kind of toil? she wants to ask, but doesn’t. “Are you looking for the essential parts while you’re on the picket lines in New Jersey?” she asks instead.

  “Clearly. I don’t want to discover when it comes time for me to die that I haven’t lived.”

  Me neither, Gina thinks, but doesn’t say, doesn’t dare say.

  “But you live in prison,” she says quietly. “Away from me.” Even quieter.

  “Here I am simplicity itself,” he says. “I have so few needs, so few wants.” He catches his breath when he says it, almost as if to stop himself. She waits. He is silent. “I have some wants,” he says, almost whispers.

  “Me too,” she says, almost whispers.

  “But I am pared down to my most basic elements. I’ve got to rise above the purely elemental, don’t you agree?”

  She doesn’t know if she agrees. She fears she doesn’t. She tries not to glance above his head where the hands of the clock are stopped motionless, as if dead.

  May the Lord remember all your sacrifices and accept your burnt offerings. May He give you the desire of your heart.

  Two

  GINA HAD NEVER SEEN anyone get as animated and lost in the topic of conversation as Ben when he was talking about his years in Panama.

  No, that wasn’t entirely true. Harry would get the same intense, faraway look, maintain the same consuming focus when they would talk about harmonizing the world, remaking it into the image of what he thought it should be and not what it was. And though she still, as always, admired Harry’s learned passion, she had heard all she could stand for the time being about the Reeds and the Debs and the Haywoods. What she wanted to hear about was Panama.

  “All forest and mountains. Impassable forest combined with tropical temperatures. And mountains like a spine. I should’ve just thrown up my hands. We couldn’t get a canal from north to south to connect. We excavated, we dammed off the C
hagres, we built a lake. We worked from two seas inland, from Cristobal to Miraflores into the center of the country, we were diligent as beavers, and when we designed and built the concrete locks that moved the sea levels up and down, I thought there was nothing harder than that or more accomplished than that. Until we got to the Continental Divide. There was no river, no water, no field, no stream. It was just mountain.” Ben shook his head.

  Gina shook hers. “I don’t know how you did it. I still don’t understand it.”

  “Me neither.”

  “But seriously.”

  “We blew it up.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m not being metaphorical. Or rhetorical. We actually blew it up.”

  “You blew up a mountain?”

  “We drilled holes, placed explosives in the holes, and detonated the mountain, yes. After the rubble settled, we used enormous steam-powered shovels to load the loose rock onto freight trains, which carted it away to landfills.”

  Gina exclaimed in frightened but impressed astonishment. “You must have had to drill a lot of holes to make a valley in a mountain, no?”

  “Six hundred holes a day,” Ben said. “We drilled the holes and detonated twice a day. Then the trains would come. So we had to build a railroad and lay new tracks constantly as the valley got longer and wider.”

  “Oh, my word. How long did this valley become?” It was called the Culebra Cut.

  “Nine miles.”

  “Ben!”

  “What? Too long or too short?”

  “Impossible!”

  “That’s what everyone said to my boss, Colonel Gaillard, the most gallant and patient of men. What you’re doing, it will never work, they said to him. It had been my honor to work with that dedicated, quiet man side by side, but I can’t tell you how often he expressed his doubts to me, how often he would say, This is just a fool’s errand, isn’t it, Mr. Shaw, what we’re attempting here? To move a mountain to let ships pass through? And I would reply, despite my gravest doubts, no, Colonel Gaillard. We must succeed, and so we shall.”

  “The newspapers were merciless,” Gina said. “It will never work, they wrote, just like it didn’t with the French. It will cost tens of thousands of lives, like it did with the French. This is a waste of human and material resources.”