Bellagrand: A Novel Page 8

  For the most part, Gina could hide from the dreadful things.

  But not all dreadful things.

  To get Verity out of her narrow flat on the fifth floor of a brownstone in Back Bay, Gina had persuaded her friend to leave her four children with her husband and help her with some of the Sodality tasks she volunteered for on the weekends. She took Verity with her to a hospital ward for terminally ill women at Massachusetts General, and then to the Boston Library where they sorted through boxes of donated books. They visited an ice cream shop and finally headed to Holy Lazarus on Clarendon. A soup kitchen had been recently set up in the basement, and on late Saturday afternoons, before evening Mass, Gina would feed the poor. She liked to do it before she received Communion.

  When they had almost finished ladling out the grits and beans and bread, a petite blond woman and a tall, imperious-looking woman walked in from the back stairs with the parish priest.

  “Oh my God,” whispered Gina to Verity, her hands going numb. “That’s Esther. And Alice!” Frantically she glanced around for a door to escape through, a pantry to hide inside.

  “Who are Esther and Alice?” Verity said in her normal voice.

  “Harry’s sister and his former fiancée!”

  “Oh, of course. That’s why I recognize—”

  “Shh! Look down!”

  Gina couldn’t follow her own advice. Father Gabriel held the blonde’s elbow deferentially, as he showed the two women the meager facilities, the few beds in the corner. He brought them to the food line. Gina thought her insides would fall out. Why did she have to wear a happy floral peasant dress, why was her hair so loosely piled atop her head, falling down, curling all over the place, why did she have to come today of all days? There was a fair by the Charles River that night, she and Verity planned to go there with the kids; still, why couldn’t she have been more tailored, ironed, polished? She lowered her head and continued serving the grits, missing the plates, making a mess, not looking up. They passed right in front of her.

  And stopped.

  Ah, Father Gabriel. Sweet, oblivious, well-meaning Father Gabriel. “Ladies, these two girls are Verity and Gina. They volunteer for us, help us prepare the food, serve it, clean up. Gina especially is very dedicated. She is a Sicilian immigrant and lives thirty miles away in some town near Andover—Gina, where do you live again?—but she’s here every Saturday, helping us. Isn’t that right, Gina?”

  “That’s right, Father.”

  “Look up, child, be polite.”

  Gina couldn’t. All the blood had drained from her face into the heart that was about to fly from her chest.

  “Gina speaks good English, I know she does. What’s your name now? She recently got married and changed her name to something American. I can never remember. What is it?”

  Gina said nothing—as if she could speak! Even Verity next to her mishandled a serving.

  The only sound came from Alice—a sharp intake of a much-needed breath.

  In the crashing heart attack silence of the next few seconds, it was Esther who spoke, never forgetting her impeccable breeding that dictated you must never make a kindly priest feel uncomfortable by keeping silent when a word would do.

  “Barrington,” Esther said, in her ice-cold polite contralto, perhaps foggy on some of the other tenets of her exalted education pertaining to tact. “I believe it is Barrington. Isn’t it?”

  Was that last question addressed to her? Gina couldn’t tell, because she was never lifting her head again as long as she lived.

  Father Gabriel laughed amiably. “No, dearest Esther, I don’t mean your last name. I mean her last name. Girls, these ladies are two of our most generous benefactors. They’re the reason the indigent men have food to eat and a bed to sleep in.”

  “Speaking of somewhere to be, Father,” Alice said, “Esther and I must run. Mustn’t we, Esther?”

  “Oh, Alice, we’re well past the time we must be running. Father, will you please excuse us?”

  “Lord Jesus, have mercy!” cried Verity after the priest and the women had barely walked away.

  “Shh!”

  “I’m going to faint!”

  “You? Verity, shh! Don’t look up, just—”

  When Gina glanced up, Father Gabriel was blessing the two women by the back door.

  Gina watched Alice tie her bonnet under her throat, close her light silk coat. A silk coat, how beautiful, how elegant. Not homespun rough Sicilian cotton, but cream silk. She watched the slender woman’s squared back, her proud shoulders, not a blond strand out of place. Gina straightened up, certain that before she left, Alice would turn and fix her with a wintry stare. As Esther was doing. Gina steeled her spine, ready for it, deserving it.

  But Alice didn’t. She took her umbrella, smiled at the priest, took Esther’s arm, and vanished through the doors without a single glance back.

  Gina was stunned. Invisible despite her height, insignificant despite her straight stature, humbled by Alice’s mute contempt, she realized Alice’s not turning around was worse than Esther’s blatant confrontation.

  She took off her apron, wiped her hands on a rag. “Excuse me, Verity, I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Right back.” Gina ran after Alice.

  What did she want, a Sicilian scene? Did she want Alice to scratch out her eyes, rend her garments, to hue and cry, to stürm und drang? She didn’t know what she wanted.

  She caught up with them, running—ladies didn’t run—a block down Commonwealth, disheveled, shoes muddy, her hair out of place. Alice and Esther stopped walking and stood, arm in arm, Alice in her perfect bonnet, exquisite gloves, and maroon silk scarf that brought out the blondness of her features. She was a pristine pool of clear water.

  “Alice,” said Gina, panting. “Can I have a word?”

  “Please step away from us,” said Esther, almost touching Gina with the back of her hand as if to swat her away. “We never want to speak to you.”

  It was Alice who stopped Esther. “It’s all right. Excuse us for a moment, Esther. It’ll take but a minute.”

  How Gina wished she were dressed better. At this moment of all moments what she would give not to be judged for her old shoes, a frayed dress two years out of fashion. What she would give for these women not to think that Harry deserved much better.

  “Tell me why you do it,” Alice said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Gina’s voice trembled. She wasn’t afraid of Alice, she was sad for Alice, and the sorrow prevented her mouth from forming the simplest words of remorse.

  “Your name appears on the Sodality lists all over Boston. Why? Why do you go to hospitals I am the benefactor of, libraries to which I donate books, churches to which I give alms? What is the profit in it for you? Do you think that if you do this, I will hate you less?”

  Gina shook her head, nodded her head, stupefied, shamed.

  “Do you do it for some twisted sense of penance? Like if you feed the poor the food I buy them, you won’t be as contemptible in God’s eyes?”

  “Maybe that,” whispered Gina inaudibly.

  Alice’s voice was strong. She hardly blinked, her blue-eyed stare condemning and unafraid. “You’re wasting your time. Nothing is going to make me hate him less or hate you less. Nothing. You tell him that. Nothing you will ever do will change what you did.”

  To this Gina could respond. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “He never even came to tell me he wasn’t going to marry me. The flowers were being carried into the church when I found out about you and him.”

  “Please forgive us.”

  Alice leaned in before she left to catch up with Esther. “You think God could ever bless a union that began in such dishonor?” She laughed. “Esther is right. Please,” she added, turning her back on Gina, “make sure we never see you again.”

  That’s when Gina stopped visiting Verity, going to demonstrations, working at soup kitchens and hospitals.
No more parade grounds, or parks, or dreams of boat rides in spring on the Charles.

  Her beloved Boston relegated to the stuff of nightmares, she stayed in Lawrence and willed herself not to think about the past, the future, the present. Not to think about anything as she waited out the black doom of Alice’s words. She prayed Alice was wrong, she hoped Alice was wrong, she believed Alice was wrong.

  Until the Bread and Roses strike.

  Two

  IN MID-SPRING OF 1913, Gina took a train and a bus to the Wayside in Concord to see her old friend and mentor Rose Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s youngest daughter was devoting the last half of her life to ministering after the needy and desperate, and Gina desperately needed to be ministered to. She knew Rose back from her high school days when she and other students from Notre Dame had traveled to Salem and Concord to work for Rose’s Home for the Sick as part of their Sodality service.

  “Child, I’m so happy to see you,” Rose said smiling, diminutive but solid, dressed as always in a nun’s habit. “I haven’t seen you since the night many years ago that you came to introduce to me your intended betrothed. How is Harry?”

  For many minutes Gina sat in the chair in the front hall and wept into Rose’s sleeve. Rose, full of compassion, said nothing. She didn’t need to. Only her palm that patted Gina’s back spoke. There, there, the palm said. There, there. “Come with me to the kitchen. I’ll make you some tea. You’ll have to walk past the beds of the terminally sick. You won’t mind, will you?”

  “I lost my baby, Rose,” Gina said when they sat down at the kitchen table.

  “God keep you. I’m sorry. I know it’s a terrible pain.”

  Gina nodded, thinking those were just words from Rose. For what did Rose know of this pain?

  Rose with her kind and round face leaned over and whispered, “I know what it is to lose a soul you love. As your husband lost his mother, I lost my beloved father at thirteen. He was too young to die.”

  “Mine too, mine too. I lost my father at fifteen,” said Gina. “I miss him every day.”

  “As your husband misses his mother?”

  “I can’t say. He never speaks of her.”

  “Still waters run deep, my child.”

  Gina wiped her face, pulled herself up in her chair.

  “First my father,” said Rose, “then my sister, then my mother. And then my husband. Yes, Gina, I had a husband. I lost him”—she continued—“because he couldn’t bear the grief we both shared.” She paused. “The grief of losing our four-year-old boy to the diphtheria that took him as suddenly as he had appeared in our life.”

  Now it was Gina’s hand that reached out to pat Rose’s black vestments. Was that presumptuous? There, there. So she did know everything.

  “I suffered as you suffer,” Rose said. “All possibilities were extinguished with Frankie’s last breath.”

  “That’s exactly what I feel,” whispered Gina.

  “Except you’re still young, you can have another baby, with the blessing of the Lord. I was nearly forty. I couldn’t. My poor George, he was just bent in half by it. He took to drink to drown himself, and soon the drink obliged.” Tears came to Rose’s eyes and she made a clucking sound, crossing herself with a shudder. “Whatever you do, my girl, keep yourself away from the liquid sorrows. They have a way of swallowing up everything, like the highest tides.”

  “Don’t worry about me on that score,” Gina said. “I don’t have a taste for it.” They sat. “Rose, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I came because I don’t know how to help myself anymore. Or my husband.”

  “That’s how I was, too,” Rose said. “But then I opened a home for dying, cast-out women. I got busy with other people’s suffering. Sometimes, during the day, it helps me forget.”

  “Yes,” Gina said. “You think that’s what I should do? Open a home for the dying?”

  Rose chuckled. “No. But tell me, how is Harry? He must also be struggling terribly through the loss of your baby.”

  Gina clenched her fists, unclenched them, folded them into a prayer.

  “We never speak of it.” She lifted her hand to stop Rose from repeating herself. “There’s been . . . I don’t know how to put it . . . a divvying up of blame.”

  “He blames you?”

  “I think he might.”

  “Do you blame him?”

  She didn’t want to lie to a nun. “I don’t not blame him.” It was like the sacrament of reconciliation coming here to talk to Rose.

  Rose shook her head. “That’s a slow poison. Like rot.”

  Gina hung her head. “I know. I tried to move past it.” Her mouth twisted, got tight. “But he hasn’t made it easy for me. He was just in jail for the problems during the Bread and Roses strike. Have you heard about that?”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t. Sorrows are so abundant here, I have no time to read the papers.”

  “I understand. Well, I thought when he was released we’d begin our life again, try again maybe . . . but as soon as he was released, he packed his bags and left.”

  “Left you?”

  “Not left me, but . . .” She didn’t know what to say, how to put it. “He asked me to go with him. He’s at another strike at the moment, in Paterson, New Jersey.”

  “New Jersey?”

  “The man who pays his salary organized that one, too.” Gina sighed. “Harry says we need the money. And we do. But I can’t leave my mother, my job. I’m lucky to have a job. So now he sends me his money, but hasn’t been home in weeks.” Her lips trembled. She didn’t want to tell Rose what Alice had said long ago that had tattooed fear into her heart because it sounded too much like the unwanted truth. Was it wrong to build a house like marriage, even a mansion like their marriage, on the ashes of someone else’s devastated heart?

  The money trickled in with the mail. Instead of being in the thick of her bed, Harry was once again in the thick of trouble. And the silk strike in Paterson was violent and unending and destined for failure. No. It was Big Bill and his radicalism that was responsible for the gradual dissolution of her marriage.

  Rose watched her conflicted face. “If you have the time, on Saturdays or Sundays, why don’t you come and help me here? I can’t pay you, as you know. We never pay, but we could definitely use a pair of good hands. I can feed you. You can sleep at the Wayside if you need a place to stay.”

  “What about my mother?”

  “Don’t you have a brother?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “A boy also can be a good child to his mother. Ask your brother to be a good son while you help me.”

  Gina took off her coat. “No use in fretting,” she said. “How about I help you now?”

  Three

  “THINGS ARE STILL QUITE SPARTAN,” Rose said to Gina as she took her around the ward, a long annex attached to the Wayside, and showed her where they kept the salves, the bandages, the sponges, the bedpans. “Please stay away if you become with child again. Just in case. Sometimes we have lepers staying with us. They are highly infectious. There is bacteria in the air from all sorts of sickness. If you’re blessed enough to fall pregnant, don’t breathe in the air of the dying. Promise me?”

  “The danger of that while the strike continues,” said Gina, “is slim. But how do you not get sick?”

  Smiling, Rose raised her eyes and palms to the ceiling. “The God of all comfort comforts us in our tribulation so that we may give comfort to those who are in any trouble.” Rose put her arm through Gina’s. “You are a good girl, and you’re going to be just fine.” She leaned in for a confidence. “You know, I had no nursing experience before I started caring for the incurably sick. Oh, yes. Don’t be so surprised. But like my dear father, I have always been fascinated by medicine. He wanted to be a doctor before he became a writer, did you know that? Not a lot of people do. What do you think? Did he make the right choice in his life’s path?”

  “Hard to say no to that, isn’t it, Rose? His books bless the future
generations.”

  “I suppose they do. But look, please don’t tell anyone else that I have no nursing training. They’ll close me down for sure. Come with me—I hear Alice.”

  Gina blanched.

  “Not that Alice,” Rose said gently. “My Alice. She must be back from her walkabout. She goes around Concord twice a week, in the afternoons. Visits the sick in their homes.” The nun paused. “Though I must say, I’m surprised the other Alice is still so top of mind for you.”

  “What can I say?” Gina nodded. “She left me with a few parting words I haven’t been able to shake from my heart. Her valedictory salvo, so to speak. When things aren’t going well, her words are all I can think about.”

  “Clearly what catches seed is the grain of truth, no matter how small.”

  “Not even that small.” Gina pointed to the door. “Let’s go say hello.”

  In the front hall they were greeted by a plump serious woman. “Gina,” Rose said, “you remember my friend and colleague Alice Huber, don’t you?”

  Nodding, Gina shook Alice’s hand.

  “Alice used to be a portrait painter,” Rose told Gina with a proud smile.

  “I’ll tell my own story, Rose, dearest.” Alice took Gina’s other arm. Flanked by the petite sisters, the towering Gina walked through the ward between the beds of the dying. “It’s true I used to be a portrait painter,” Alice concurred. “But my heart wasn’t in it. I was looking for something else. I said that when I found a work of perfect charity, I would join it. And so I did.”

  “It’s not for everyone, Alice,” Rose said. “Don’t judge people.” She looked up at Gina. “My friend can be too critical sometimes, God love her. I tell her all the time—people are the keepers of their own souls, not you.”

  “And do I listen, Rose?”

  “Hardly ever.”

  “Exactly. Do you know, Gina,” Alice continued, “that before we built this small annex, we housed the sick right in Rose’s Wayside?”

  “And it wasn’t even my Wayside anymore.” Rose laughed. “Imagine how my dear Harriet felt about it.” The Wayside was the only home Nathaniel Hawthorne had ever owned. In 1879, many years after his death, Rose and George bought the beloved house to keep it in the family. Financial hardship forced them to sell it just four years later to George’s publisher and his wife, Harriet Stone, also known as Margaret Sidney, the writer of children’s books.