Bellagrand: A Novel Read online

  “Okay . . .” she drew out an answer. “Reproductive freedom also means having a baby, does it not?”

  “Not according to your pamphlets. Have you read them?”

  She didn’t want to admit she had stopped reading them. “I don’t know what to tell you. I want a baby.”

  “So sudden?”

  “We’re married six years. That seems sudden to you?”

  “It doesn’t seem un-sudden,” Harry said. “Besides, you expressly told me no babies. Remember Chicago?”

  “Yes, I remember Chicago. Our few brief days of rainy honeymoon bliss.” The only honeymoon they’d had, she wanted to add, but didn’t. “I was twenty! You can’t imagine that at twenty and still in college I would not want a child?”

  “I thought it spoke to a larger state of your independent character.”

  “It spoke to me being twenty and in college.”

  “And going to hear Emma Goldman sermonize every week? Did you not hear her say babies are slavery?”

  “Like I pay attention. She also says God is slavery. And marriage is slavery. And work is slavery. We must choose carefully what to agree with.”

  “Oh goodness, but is the bloom off the rose!” Harry half-feigned shock. “Quite frightening. Is this what’s ahead for me, too?”

  “No, I’m still fond of you. Do you want me to show you how fond?”

  “Kill me if I ever say no.”

  He took from her some sweet, not so quiet love, and afterward in the dark, in bed, held her close, caressed her face, her body, and softly whispered to her, as confounded as before. “I simply don’t understand your precipitous change of heart.”

  “Yes, it’s like falling off a cliff,” she whispered, tired herself, relaxed, sated, happy, and yet still needing to say what had to be said.

  “Are you being facetious again? I can’t tell with you.”

  “Me? Never.” She half-listened, gently rubbing the arm that embraced her. “But Harry, in our current circumstance, Mother Jones may be right. You can’t have a baby. Only me. That’s the law of the prophets. I can’t do what I do now and take care of a baby.”

  Mary Harris Jones, or Mother Jones, was one of the co-founders of the Industrial Workers of the World and a tireless labor union organizer. She was also detested by most of the prominent women of the day for being vehemently opposed to abortion and women’s rights. She told everyone who would listen that the main reason for juvenile delinquency was mothers working outside the home. This endeared her to no one.

  “I suppose I could take care of it,” Harry said, in the tone of someone who might say, I guess I can try making ice cream.

  “I don’t want you to take care of it. I want to have a baby because I want to be a mother. I don’t want to be called a mother. I want to be a mother. I want to mother a child. I want that to be the work of my life.”

  With an everlasting sigh, he kissed her lips, kissed her between her swollen breasts, kissed her head, closed his eyes, breathed deeply. “Tell you what,” he said. “How about we cross that bridge when we get to it?”

  He settled in for sleep. Gina was quiet, lying in his arms, barely breathing, listening for the rhythmic rising and falling of his heart.

  “Harry,” she whispered at last. “Amore mio, I think we’re about to cross that bridge.”

  Lightly he laughed, squeezing her. “Why don’t we give our coupling a few weeks to seed, sugarplum.”

  She raised her head from his chest, looked up at him in the dark. “Crossing that bridge now, mio marito.”

  Finally he understood.

  For a long while he didn’t speak, his back to her. She stroked him. He didn’t move away.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I am telling you. This is what I’m doing right now.”

  He put on his overshirt and slumped on his side of the bed. “Gina, what are we going to do?”

  “We’ll be fine. Isn’t that what you always say about everything? We’ll be fine.”

  “You’re not worried?”

  “Are you worried?” She ran her fingernails down his back tapping and scraping her fingers over him to rile him. “Caro, you’re not ready to move out of my mother’s house, you’re not ready to get a job, you’re not ready for a baby. Before me you weren’t ready to be married. You’re thirty-four years old. It’s time. Time to take your one life by its unformed horns. You aren’t going to get another chance to swim in this river again.”

  “I thought you were happy with us, with the way things are.”

  She didn’t want to pause, but couldn’t help an ever so slight hesitation. “I’m not unhappy. But I wouldn’t mind not living with my mother. I wouldn’t mind a little privacy with you, just you and me and our baby. I wouldn’t mind not having to work two jobs, be away from you all these hours during the day.”

  “One of us would still have to be away,” he said. “If I was working.”

  She nodded in quiet nonjudgmental agreement. “Ti amo. But I would like for that person to now be you.”

  “Gina . . . we agreed.”

  “Okay. We agreed.”

  “And then you went to hear one feminist after another talk about free love, birth control, women behaving like men, and so on.”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “And what? I got tired of it.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “You got tired of it so long ago, you haven’t come with me for years. Which is why I’ve had to keep dragging Angela with me to all those meetings. Which is why she met Arturo. Which is why my mother blames me for Angela’s current predicament.”

  “What predicament? Love?”

  “Something like that.”

  “My point is,” he said, “we never talked about having babies. We only talked about not having babies.”

  Gina sighed. “When was the last time we talked about not having a baby?”

  She saw by his silence he couldn’t remember. And he usually remembered everything.

  “In any case,” she continued, “what would you like me to do about it?”

  “Nothing, clearly.”

  “All right then.”

  “Where are we going to live? We’re still at your mother’s house.”

  “I can’t make enough, that’s true,” she said. “I’m not a man. But you are. And you can.”

  “Did you do this to force me to get some menial job?”

  “No, Harry,” said Gina. “I just want a baby. I wish you still had your father’s bank accounts to fall back on. I know things were easier for you when you could just buy what you wanted and send on the bill to your father’s accountant. I won’t object if you decide to get in touch with him.”

  “You know that will never happen. Not after what he did, what he said.”

  “You can tell them about their grandchild. Esther—”

  “Never.”

  “Your sister might be happy to hear from you, no?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care.”

  “Babies smooth over a lot of things.”

  “Not this.”

  “Mimoo says . . .”

  “I don’t care. Baby, no baby, my father, my sister are gone from my life. Just like they wanted.”

  She fell back on the bed. “Why are you pushing them away, caro? Your family, my brother. Your friend Ben. You used to be so close. Why have you not written to him? You don’t even know if he’s still in Panama.”

  “If I don’t know where he is, how can I write to him?”

  “I bet your sister knows. You could ask her.”

  “Stop it.”

  “His mother must know. You could get in touch with her. You got along with his mother so well.”

  “Yes, but she gets along too well with my father. I’m not going to reach out to her, Gia. Besides, I don’t think Ben wants to hear from me anyway.”

  “You can’t be on the outs with everyone, Harry.”

  “Salvo hates me so mu
ch he won’t step foot in his own mother’s house. How is this my fault?”

  Gina said nothing, biting her lip, forcing herself to say nothing. Why did she have to be a Sicilian? They always blurted out every damn fool thing on their minds.

  “Do you know what Mimoo says?”

  He fell back on the bed too. His hand went over her belly. He spun toward her, bent over her, kissed her. “No. Tell me what Mimoo says.”

  “She says the baby brings his own food.”

  “Mmm.” He kissed her bare stomach, caressed her hips, fondled her breasts. “You know who brings her own food? You.”

  Five

  SHE MAKES HER OWN tomato paste. She is dressed in some shimmering gauzy summery thing, and her hair is tied up. The dress has to be loose and sheer because she is about to undertake heavy physical labor. She might perspire. All he does is sit and watch her, his mouth slightly open, his whole soul short of breath. He has watched her make the paste so many times. He never gets tired of it.

  She has been simmering tomatoes all morning, boiling them down. She has strained all the pulp, removed their seeds, their skins. She has undressed the tomatoes.

  Now she needs his help, and that’s why he’s been sitting at the kitchen table gaping at her.

  They drag two plywood boards from the porch down the stairs and to the back. The boards take up nearly the whole overgrown yard. But that’s where the sunshine is. It’s late summer and warm, and it’s the only way to make enough paste to last the winter. The tomatoes she grows are always splendid. In his father’s house he never ate tomatoes the way he eats them now, raw, cooked, boiled, steamed, fried. Any which way he relishes the tomatoes. It’s the fruit from the Sicilian tree of life.

  They carry the two pots of stewed tomatoes to the boards. She spreads the thick messy pulp over the boards, tilting them slightly to drain off any remaining liquid. There is much liquid. They set the tomato boards in the sunshine to dry.

  Mimoo is cleaning houses, Salvo is sweeping the streets. Harry and Gina make love all afternoon, as the sun moves forty-five degrees in the August sky. They can barely stumble down the stairs to bring her boards back inside. All he wants now is to take a long nap, but it’s almost dinnertime, and she is forcing him to help her. But now, after, he doesn’t want to.

  They roll the dried-out paste into large balls. He tries not to make any off-color jokes, but fails. He doesn’t particularly want to make jokes. What he wants is to nap and then make love to her again. Their hands are sticky with gooey sickly sweet paste, red and overripe. They clean their hands as best they can. Sometimes they make love again, with all their clothes on to save time, though it’s so late, and any minute everyone else will come home—Angela, Mimoo, Salvo, Rita for Saturday night dinner. Panting and disheveled, with the hands that just loved one another, they coat the balls of tomato paste with a layer of olive oil, cover them tightly with cheesecloth and pack them into large glass jars. It’s work for a whole Saturday afternoon. She grows enough tomatoes to feed them the whole winter. They never have to worry about sauce for anything they cook. They always have plenty.

  Harry associates tomatoes with love. He gets a physical throb in the pit of the place that makes him a man, a flame of fire about two pounds large whenever she opens one of those jars, whenever she feeds him from them, when she asks him what he wants for dinner. What springs to his mind is the heady, acidic sweetness of their sweltering summer afternoons.

  Six

  IF HARRY EXPRESSED BOTH inwardly and outwardly a certain quarrelsome ambivalence about the regeneration of his future, no one had any doubt how Mimoo felt about it. It was as if all her ailments had left her bones. After Gina told her mother the blessed news, she jumped out of bed, threw on nice clothes, and ran through the streets of Lawrence, carrying candles to the church and chocolates to her friends. “Finally she’s having a baby! She’s having a baby!” Mimoo bought flowers, went to the market, made a feast, had a celebration to which she invited what seemed like half of Lawrence. “You didn’t give me a chance to celebrate your pretend wedding. At the very least I can rejoice in the fruit of it.”

  Harry leaned into Gina’s neck. “Why does your dear mother insist on calling it pretend? Does she want to see the judge’s papers?”

  Gina kissed his nose. “I think she’d prefer to see the priest’s papers.”

  He grabbed her around her still slender waist and pulled her out onto the porch. “So she thinks we’re improperly married.” He laughed. “Does that mean you’re a kept woman?” He kissed her. “Why do I find that so enticing?”

  True to her roots as a good wife and true woman, Gina returned his open-mouthed kiss and tamped down the other Sicilian part of herself and didn’t say what she was ashamed to be thinking when he was being all flirty with her and kind, which was: of all the things I am, and I am many things, one of the things I’m absolutely not is a kept woman.

  “Go to Boston, you two,” Mimoo ordered them, not a day later. “You tell your family, Harry, and you, Gia, go tell your brother.”

  Gina agreed. Harry amiably shook his head.

  “Salvo will come around, Harry.”

  “He won’t, Mimoo.”

  “He will.”

  “He won’t.”

  “God, why are you such a stubborn mule?”

  “He won’t come back and I’m the mule?”

  Mimoo pressed her son-in-law: “Salvo is waiting for you to beg his forgiveness. He just needs to hear repentance from you.”

  Harry shook his head. “I’ve tried already. It’s no use.”

  “How many years ago did you try?”

  “Your son has too much pride,” Harry said.

  “And you?”

  “I’m not your son.”

  “Charming, Harry,” whispered Gina, sitting nearby, listening.

  Mimoo bristled. “You’re my daughter’s so-called husband.”

  “I’m actually her husband.”

  “In our country, husbands, even such as you are, are considered family. Not in your country?”

  Harry said nothing.

  “Like I was saying. Besides, you’re still somebody’s son, aren’t you?”

  “Not anymore.”

  Seven

  HALFHEARTEDLY HARRY SEARCHED THROUGH the job ads in the paper. “What a burden it is,” he exclaimed one night, “to keep needing paid work.”

  “Welcome to real life,” Gina said. “Not the pretend one you’ve been living.”

  She was right, of course, and he didn’t like to argue with her. He certainly wasn’t going to argue that he did indeed once live what had seemed to him a fake life. To fall in love was one thing. But to choose her was another. He married her because she was the realest thing he had ever found. There was no calibration in his life with her. There was no pretense and no temperance. Every ball was up in the air at once. It was always too hot or too cold; there was too much wine or not enough. His bed was never empty, and that made up for many other missing things—the conjugal union of two kindred spirits, two poles apart when it came to their station in life, but one in the only way it counted. One of body, one of soul.

  Still . . . unmitigated smells and labor, constant labor. There was no time to ever think, make long-term plans, figure things out, barely even read!

  “Perhaps you’d like to move to Kalamazoo, Michigan?” Harry asked Gina. “So I could work on Henry Ford’s assembly line.”

  “The man will pay you five dollars a day, Harry,” Gina said. “That’s ransom for a prince.”

  “Five dollars?”

  “A day!”

  “Florenz Ziegfeld spends three hundred dollars on stage pillows!” Harry said. “Three hundred dollars each.”

  “Perhaps then you should be the one selling him these magical pillows.”

  “There you go, always turning every conversation back to money.”

  “I don’t do that.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “You mean lack of money?”<
br />
  “Whatever you want to call it.”

  And just like that, another casual spousal back-and-forth turned into intemperance. No calibration ever.

  Harry found a day job that lasted a week, delivering paper goods to local restaurants. He drove a small truck, picking up supplies from Weston and delivering them to Lawrence and Andover. The job ended a week before Christmas. Gina said nothing. He said nothing, but went out looking again. A few days later he returned home excited, and told her he had found work. She was still in her first trimester and throwing up all the time.

  “Full-time work?” Gina tried to sound excited herself.

  “Absolutely,” he said, getting the corkscrew for the celebratory red wine.

  “That’s wonderful! With who?”

  “Bill Haywood.”

  Gina stepped back from the table at which she had been about to sit. “Big Bill Haywood?” she repeated incredulously.

  “Is there another?”

  She fell quiet. Bile came up in her throat.

  “I already help Joe and Arturo with organization, ideas, planning. I’m always helping them with this speech and that. Now I’ll be paid for it. Better than doing it pro bono, no?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that,” Gina said. “What could one-eyed Bill possibly want with you, Harry?”

  “Why wouldn’t he want something to do with me?”

  “What’s the job?”

  “I don’t know. He needs something, I do it.”

  “See, that’s the part that worries me.”

  “It shouldn’t worry you.” He opened the wine and fetched two glasses. “It should make you happy.”

  “Big Bill!” she exclaimed again. “You do know that he recently stood trial for blowing up a man with a bomb, right?”

  “Come on, you know he wasn’t convicted.”

  She shook her head, but not hard; the nausea was making it difficult to react properly. “This is a terrible omen. Why is he in town? What is he planning here? This isn’t a mining town.” Bill Haywood had been the president of the Miners Federation before it joined with the Socialists to become the Industrial Workers of the World. “The man’s had nothing but trouble with the law, and has wreaked nothing but havoc every place he’s been. Every town he goes to, someone dies, gets shot, stampeded, beaten, bombed. Every single one! He has never passed through a town without taking half a dozen scalps with him. You want to get involved with that?”