Bellagrand: A Novel Read online

  Harry, Harry?

  It wasn’t Harry. She was yanked into a standing position by a man. People running everywhere. Tent stakes violently pulled from the ground. People tripping over them, heavy gray canvas falling on their heads. The man who helped her up looked down at the ground at her feet and said, “Lady, are you shot? You’re bleeding!” The last thing she thought before fainting was that Harry was going to be so upset she hadn’t stayed under the table.

  Seven

  WHEN SHE CAME TO, she was in her bed. No Harry, no Arturo, no Joe, no Angela. Only her mother sitting by her side, silently crying. Her mother and Salvo!

  “Salvo?” Gina was so happy for a moment. She raised her hand to reach for him.

  “Why doesn’t anybody ever listen to me?” Mimoo said, sobbing into her rosary beads. Her arthritis and tears prevented her from counting them properly. She kept rolling them around between her barely mobile fingers.

  “How are you feeling, sorella?” Salvo said, the hat in his hands twitching.

  “Where’s Harry?” Gina reached down to touch her stomach. “Is he all right? What’s happened?”

  Salvo got up and left the bedroom before Mimoo could speak.

  Mimoo shook her head. “He’s not all right,” she said. “Things are as bad as can be, child. Harry, Arturo, Joe have all been arrested. Along with dozens of others.” She sobbed in a prayer. “They’re about to be charged with murder.”

  “Murder? What murder? Harry too?”

  Mimoo cried louder. “Our precious angel, Angela. Your cousin. Like your sister. Gone. Struck down. Stray bullet. Right to the heart. Oh!”

  Santa Maria, prega per noi peccattori.

  Gina tried to stand up.

  “Stop it, lie down,” Mimoo said. “You’re still bleeding, it’s not safe for you, you’re sick, lie down.”

  She would not lie down. “Bleeding, why?”

  Her mother wouldn’t answer her.

  “Mimoo? Salvo!”

  “Don’t call him. He can’t speak to you.”

  “Salvo!”

  “You lost your baby, Gia, my child. Nessuna sofferenza, ma la vita eterna.”

  Now Gina didn’t want to speak to anyone. Clutching her stomach, she turned away. Where is Harry? she whispered, but no one heard. I need my husband.

  Salvo was so upset, he couldn’t come back into the room to comfort her. Mumbling a few indecipherables from the door, he left, ran.

  No one knew what had happened. In the commotion, shots ringing out, Angela was dragged inside a shop, everyone thought for safety. The police opened fire, fearing they had been fired upon. Perhaps she had already been shot before she was pulled inside the grocery store. No one could say for certain, but when the crowd had dispersed, Angela’s blood flowed in the streets and Arturo and Joe had been arrested. They had been nowhere near Essex Street, nowhere near Angela. But because they were Wobblies, they were charged with conspiracy to incite a riot—in other words with a felony that resulted in a woman’s death. That was murder. If convicted they faced execution.

  No one saw Angela get hit or fall. No one heard the shot that pierced her heart. There were dozens of injured people on the ground, but only one of them lay dead, shot through the chest. Angela was twenty-eight years old, though all the papers later said Annie LoPizo was thirty, not knowing that Angela Tartaro had long ago lied about her age when she first came to America from Sicily so she could get the job that eventually claimed her life.

  Angela’s life wasn’t the only one claimed. For days blood seeped out onto the starched white sheets of Gina’s bed.

  Bill kept the strike going as long as he could, but a few weeks after Angela’s death, it ended. It took sixty-three days, fifty thousand women, one dead woman, and one lost baby. American Woolen agreed to all the demands, and the women returned to work without a contract in mid-March.

  Everybody but Angela.

  Eight

  JOE AND ARTURO WERE held without bail. Because Harry was not a member of the IWW, he was charged with a lesser crime of assault and destruction of private property. Bail was set against him, bail that no one could pay.

  It took Gina a little while to get herself together to go see Harry in the Lawrence city jail. She couldn’t face him. She finally went because she dreaded the questions he might otherwise ask. What took you so long to get here? You’re my wife, why didn’t you come?

  He said nothing. He couldn’t look at her. He didn’t reach for her across the table, he didn’t speak to her, offered no words of comfort or remonstration. He just sat, and she sat. She was too afraid she would cry so she held her tongue and kept her mouth shut. His inscrutable gray eyes were focused on anything but her.

  “Are you all right?” he finally said. His voice was raspy.

  Shrugging, she nodded, but didn’t trust her voice.

  “Can I get out?”

  “I don’t know how,” she said. “We don’t have the money for bail.”

  “Can we collect some? It’s just a loan.”

  “It’s five hundred dollars, Harry.”

  “It’s temporary. Just get me out of here.”

  “How do you propose I do this?” She squeezed her hands together.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t want to be in jail. I can’t stay in jail.”

  “Harry, please can you call your father?”

  His gray eyes froze over. He blinked in judgment. “No.” He stood up.

  “Harry, please. He can help you. He will help you.”

  “I went to him once, when he called in the money he had lent to your brother. Do you remember how he treated me?”

  “But what if you get convicted? What if you go to prison?”

  “I’ll rot before I ever ask him for a single thing.”

  Gina did not understand. “Mimoo is right,” she said. “What father would turn away a son in such trouble?”

  “Herman Barrington, that’s who. I see, so you refuse to get me out? When is my trial?”

  “In the fall. And I don’t refuse—”

  “What month is it now?”

  “March.”

  “March! Gina!”

  “What would you like me to do, Harry?” She paused. “Perhaps Big Bill can help you, lend you what you need? Surely he can help. You’re here because of him.”

  “I don’t think he sees it that way.”

  “Really? Big Bill is the one you trust to interpret visual stimuli?”

  “Very good, why don’t you try your ad hominem tack on him. I don’t see how it could fail.”

  They didn’t and couldn’t speak about the unspeakable. They quarreled about only what could be quarreled about.

  Right before time was up, they stared at each other mutely, hiding behind the veil of their blank eyes and cold words.

  “Why didn’t you stay under the table, like I told you?” he finally asked.

  “I did. The table fell. The tent fell. I fell.”

  “Why did you go there at all? I told you not to go to Essex Street.”

  “Your all-seeing boss commanded me to. What choice did I have? I tried to find you. Maybe if you had listened to me and stayed away from that man . . .”

  Harry stood up abruptly. “Are we done? I guess so.”

  “You wouldn’t be in jail, is how I wanted to finish,” finished Gina.

  “Yes, of course that’s how you wanted to finish.”

  “Would you like me to call him for you? Ask him for five hundred dollars?”

  “No, Gina.”

  She stood up too. “I didn’t think so. I guess I’ll see you next Sunday.”

  At his arraignment, Harry went before a judge and said he was not a paying member of the IWW but would join as soon as he was freed. The judge said, “Well, then, Mr. Barrington, we had better make sure you don’t go free.”

  Elston Purdy, the lousy public defender assigned to Harry, though overworked and indifferent, was sharp enough to question why bail had been set so uncommonl
y high. It seemed unduly punitive, Purdy said to the judge. It took a while to get a straight answer. Bail was set high, the judge finally admitted, because Harry was Herman Barrington’s son. The customary low bail wasn’t the impediment to the likes of the Barringtons that it was to the ordinary folk of Lawrence, who couldn’t raise fifty dollars, much less ten times that. The public defender proceeded to successfully argue that a son should not be penalized for the inaccessible wealth of his estranged father. That fell under cruel and unusual detainment. “It’s like setting bail high because John Paul Getty is a wealthy man, Your Honor. My client and his father have not spoken to each other in seven years. He has no more right to Herman Barrington’s accounts than he does to Mr. Getty’s is what I’m trying to say.”

  The judge considered the motion for two days.

  Harry was released without any bail at all, on his own recognizance.

  At the end of September, despite Gina’s volcanic imprecations, Harry marched in support of Joe and Arturo. “They’re being railroaded, Gina, and you know it. The charges against them are bogus. They’re now being implicated in the planting of those undetonated bombs found at Wood Mill. You know they weren’t involved in that. They’re being set up. I won’t stand for it. And you shouldn’t either. They’re our friends.”

  “Angela is dead,” Gina said. “They’re not my friends.”

  There were no American flags at the parade, but many red flags and banners that proclaimed the anarchist slogan, no god no master. Harry’s involvement was duly noted by the district attorney’s office.

  A few weeks later, in October, a hundred thousand people watched and participated in the Columbus Day Parade to demonstrate Lawrence’s faith in democracy and the American way. Harry was conspicuously absent from these festivities, a fact that was also duly noted by the authorities.

  Joe and Arturo remained locked up until November 1912, when their trial finally got under way, right after their old friend Eugene Debs kicked Big Bill Haywood out of the Socialist Party and received a million votes for president of the United States. “An elective office is only one step toward a revolution,” Debs said in his concession speech to Woodrow Wilson.

  During the trial Joe and Arturo were locked in metal cages in the courtroom. With the stakes being execution, the two men had the temerity to represent themselves against the charge of murder.

  Arturo protested his innocence eloquently as only a poet could. “I loved her,” he said of Angela. “I would never kill her. I would never put her in danger. She was my good and true friend. I love life, I would never risk life and my soul by committing murder. Ask my loved ones, ask my family. Out in the free world waits a fine woman whom I love and who loves me. I have parents who are praying for my release. My dear friend Joe Ettor and I, we are nothing more than foot soldiers in the mighty army we call the working class of the world.”

  The prosecutor told him that he was deliberately misunderstanding the charges brought against him. He was on trial for murder, not his political beliefs.

  “No! It is communism itself that is on trial,” cried Arturo in the courtroom, arguing for his very life. “It has nothing to do with that poor girl’s death. Does the district attorney really believe that the gallows can settle an idea? If the idea lives, it’s because history judges it right. Joe and I, and our friend Harry too, ask only for justice. Whatever my social views are, they are. I am an immigrant. I came to this country for freedom. Like my religion, my politics cannot be tried in this courtroom.”

  Smiling Joe, in his own impassioned plea to the jury, argued not only for the morality of a general strike, but for the very overthrow of capitalism because it was intrinsically immoral. “You cannot argue with immorality as if it has a voice, a reason, you cannot argue with it as with an equal partner in a discussion between men! It will not stand. We are not guilty. We are communists! And being a communist is not yet a crime in this country, is it?”

  An electrified Harry sat in the courtroom and soaked it all in. Gina was deeply unimpressed with Harry’s demeanor. Mimoo was deeply unimpressed with Arturo’s oratory. “I told you, Gia,” she said, “that man was no good. Did you hear him say he had another woman waiting for him, another woman he loved? Poor Angela! Poor girl.”

  “Mimoo, is that all you took away from their closing arguments?” Gina tried to suppress the anger Arturo’s revelation sparked in her.

  “I took away the most important part,” Mimoo said. “He never loved our sainted, beautiful, martyred child, while she ran around after him like a schoolgirl, and for what? He left the entire jury in tears after that fine and fraudulent soliloquy! But where is our Angela? St. Mary’s Cemetery, that’s where. How many times did I tell her to listen to me? I know everything.” Mimoo cried and prayed.

  “It wasn’t fraudulent, Mimoo.” Harry, who didn’t usually argue with Mimoo, argued that day. “It was a sincere effort to protest their innocence.”

  “They do too much protesting if you ask me,” Mimoo said. “The protesting is what got them into this mess to begin with, and our Angela killed.”

  “Mimoo, you and your daughter are immigrants,” said Harry. “They were fighting for your rights, her rights. They were on your side against the greed of capitalists, who care nothing for your well-being, only for making a dollar. How can you not respect what they did?”

  Mimoo laughed. She said a few choice words in Italian, which she didn’t translate for him even when asked. “Harry, you are a learned man,” Mimoo said, “and a well-read man, I know that. You’re always buried in some book. Our electric bill is proof of how much you read. You have many fine qualities. But there are things you are completely ignorant about, and I don’t mind telling you what some of them are.”

  “Please tell me, Mimoo, what I’m ignorant about.”

  “One is how fathers feel about their sons.”

  As soon as she said it, all three of them, sitting on a bench outside the courtroom while court was in recess, bowed their heads. August had come and gone, and with it Harry and Gina’s chance to find out how parents felt about their own children.

  “What’s the second thing, Mimoo?” said Harry, hurrying on.

  “Do you know who Guilherme Medeiros Silva is?”

  “I don’t believe I do.”

  “That’s why,” said Mimoo, “you are ignorant.”

  Harry waited. He turned to Gina. “Do you know who that is?”

  Gina sighed. “Mimoo, leave him alone. What do you hope to achieve?”

  “Do I want to know who it is?”

  “No,” said Gina. “You don’t.”

  “Guilherme Jr. was born in this country,” Mimoo said, “in a hut off Martha’s Vineyard, but he was the son of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. His father worked as a crewman on a whaling ship. He was killed when the boy was twelve.”

  Harry opened his hands. “Okay.”

  “That’s when Guilherme left school and went to work to support his mother and younger sisters. He took a job at the cotton mill in New Bedford. He worked very hard and was noticed by his employer. He got promoted. He learned everything about manufacturing and production and costs. When he was eighteen years old he went to Philadelphia to study stocks and bonds. After he came back he took a job at a factory, turned that factory around, saved it from bankruptcy, made it profitable. That’s when he was asked to save another mill in trouble. He not only saved it, but saved eight other nearly bankrupt mills around it. In 1899, the year your wife, her brother, and I came to America, he started to build the largest textile mill in the world. The one that produces twenty percent of all the woolens and worsteds in the United States.”

  “Wood Mill?” Harry said.

  “Yes. He named it after himself. William Madison Wood is the American name of little Guilherme Silva, born in a shack, son of a deckhand. An immigrant like your wife. That’s your greedy capitalist whose business rebuilt this town and whose business you brought to its knees. Go picket against him.”

>   The jury delivered its verdict: the two Italian men were acquitted of all charges. Two weeks later, however, Harry, facing a lesser charge of felonious public disturbance, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison, commuted to two months followed by two years’ probation.

  While Harry served out his sentence in January and February of 1913, Big Bill stopped paying his wages. “But tell him that I’m organizing another project,” Bill said to Gina when she called to collect, “even bigger than Lawrence, and as soon as he gets out, he’s right back on the payroll because I need his help. This one is at the silk factories in Paterson, New Jersey. We’re mobilizing now.”

  When Gina protested the lack of wages, Bill patiently explained to her that a man could not be paid for hours he didn’t work. “That way anarchy lies,” Bill said. “And we are not anarchists, are we? Well, maybe you are. I know most women are. No, we are communists.”

  A year after the Lawrence strike, the agreements Big Bill had hastily set up with Wood Mill had all but collapsed and most of the gains the women paid for with Angela’s blood and Gina’s baby’s blood had all but vanished. It took the town many years to recover from the damaging effects of the strike. Some say it never recovered. When the textile mills in the Carolinas started to make the worsteds and woolens at a fraction of the northern price, American Woolen went out of business and Lawrence with it.

  Certainly Gina felt that she and Harry had never recovered.

  Chapter 3

  A SERVANT OF RELIEF

  One

  TO HIDE WAS EVERYTHING. In 1905, in the immediate aftermath of her and Harry’s elopement, Gina could hardly hide from herself, but she took some comfort in being anonymous to others. She didn’t want to face the questions she couldn’t answer, not in Lawrence, nor in Boston.

  Why aren’t you back in school? Why isn’t he working? Why didn’t you have a proper wedding? Where is his family? What happened to all his money? Wasn’t he about to marry someone else?

  When she went to visit her old friend Verity, they barely talked about the past, Verity’s hands full and eyes myopic of the current chaotic present.