Bellagrand Page 20

  Three

  AT FIRST HARRY TOOK what he called his “bad fortune” in stride. Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman had also been arrested in other parts of the country for their protests against the war, as was Bill Haywood. Harry thought he was in good company. He told Gina the United States simply couldn’t convict all those public figures at once. Gina thought Harry was wildly naïve and said so. “You pretend you want peace,” she told him, “but all you do is foment strife. You, Big Bill, Emma, Eugene Debs. All you do is sow seeds of conflict and struggle. And then you lament why you don’t have the two things you clearly do not want.”

  “Which are?”

  “Peace,” she said, “and freedom.”

  “Did you come to jail to visit me or to torment me?”

  “Why do I have to choose?”

  All their savings for a car that never happened were not enough to make his extortionate bail. She borrowed from a resentful Mimoo, from St. Vincent’s, from Father O’Reilly, and from the First Savings Bank of Lawrence—and was still short by half.

  “There is a tide in the affairs of men,” Harry said to her in the city jail while she was battling to raise the money for his release, “which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, and all the voyage of your life is bound in shallows and miseries.”

  Gina bowed her head, pretending to agree with him, while bitter tears fell from her eyes.

  “You have nothing to cry about. You’re not in prison.”

  “I once wrapped you in myself,” she said to him, “but you have wrapped me in your own shallows. And yet look how deep they are. If you’re convicted, you could go away for twenty years! That’s your choice, but I’m going to be thirty-three and without a husband. That’s not my choice.”

  “Your choice was me. And this is who I am.”

  She struggled up. The visiting hours were over.

  “Doesn’t seem fair, does it,” she said blackly, “that one wrong decision can thus lay waste my life.”

  Which wrong decision did she mean? His decision to parade against Faneuil Hall? Or her decision to marry him?

  “Your life? What about my life? I could’ve gone to Russia and could right now be writing dispatches about it, like John Reed. It’s all I wanted. Instead you forced my hand and kept me here, and now look at me. Look where I am.”

  “I didn’t know you were so passionate a writer, Harry.” Gina clutched her years-old frayed purse. “You’re barely even a letter writer. It’s a lost art, I hear, letter writing.”

  He was scarcely listening to her.

  “Did you hear what John Reed wrote to Max Eastman?” He was red with his disappointment. “The people are crowding to his lectures by the hundreds, by the thousands!”

  “That’s because John Reed is wisely not in prison.”

  “They protest against the way things are! That’s the now, the protest is the future. Did you read what he wrote? That people weep with joy when they hear him, knowing there is something so close to dreams coming true in Russia.”

  She was weeping too for a place where dreams came true.

  Instead of going to Russia, Gina pawned Harry’s two-carat diamond ring and paid his bail.

  Four

  RELEASED FROM PRISON, Harry returned to Lawrence and spent the summer of 1918 on pretrial hearings and motions, preparing his defense and shuttling back and forth to Boston. They were completely broke, materially and emotionally, and had nothing to say. Despite Harry’s casual apathy, they both feared the ominous tide that was coming, like a tsunami after an earthquake. They both understood the change in the American air. The country was at war, and Harry broke its laws shouting hate from the pedestals and throwing rocks. Gina ground out each day through sheer will: get up, work, clean, help Mimoo, pray, sleep.

  But by the end of August she couldn’t take it anymore. By the end of August she had something to say, having come to the end of her very long tether one broiling afternoon when she had returned home for lunch to find the house a wreck and Harry unshaven and insolent.

  She glared at him, trying to calm herself before she spoke. She counted to ten, breathed deeply. It didn’t work.

  “What?” he barked. “I’m trying to put together my defense. I have no time for women’s work.”

  “Do you know what Nathaniel Hawthorne says?”

  “I don’t give a fig. Now is not the time for his pithy sayings.”

  “On the contrary, it’s precisely the time. He says,” Gina continued in a controlled eruption, “that even a dull river has a deep religion of its own. So, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though perhaps unconsciously.”

  “What does that have to do with me? Are you calling me dull?”

  “No, no.” She shook her head. “You’re far beyond that. I don’t agree with Nathaniel this time. I don’t think you have religion running under the sludge. I think with you, it’s just sludge.”

  Gone were the yesterdays of well-appointed drawing rooms and Harry in his gray waistcoat and white-pique trousers, entertaining by the fire with a cocktail in his hand. This Harry wore the same stained cotton trousers ironed by her last Sunday and a brown shirt misbuttoned and torn at the collar. She used to repair his old clothes, but when her sewing machine broke and they didn’t have the money to repair it, she stopped. To think that Harry once wore lacquered shoes when he courted her in New Hampshire, dazzled her in silk morning shirts in Revere Beach, accompanied her on the ocean promenades in black swagger coats to contrast with her pink summer dresses.

  “Oh, you’re delightful this afternoon. Why in the world did you even come home for lunch if you’re going to be like this?”

  “Why in the world did I beg and borrow and pawn my diamond to get you out of jail if you’re going to be both lazy and nasty? Look at our house! Look at you!”

  “I’m nasty? Are you listening to yourself? I should’ve just stayed in jail.”

  “Perfect!”

  “No one nags me there.”

  “I find that difficult to believe.”

  “Lots of things you have no clue about, sweetheart.”

  “Do you have a clue about how to be a good husband?”

  “Oh, like you have about being a good wife?”

  She gasped, let out a hiss of shallow air.

  “God! Why didn’t you just leave me three years ago?” she yelled, hurling his newspapers and cigarette butts at him.

  “Why didn’t you leave me?” He shot up out of his chair, the ashtrays, cups, papers falling to the floor.

  “I should have! I’d rather be without a husband than live like this, unforgiven. Why did you bother to stay if you knew you couldn’t forgive me?”

  “Why are you so provincial? What does any of this have to do with you? Have you been stricken blind with brain fever? Is that why you can’t see?”

  “I see everything!”

  “I’m about to lose my life!” he yelled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Forgiven you for what? That you fucked another man while you were married to me, pretending to love me? You aspire to be so bourgeois, Gina. You think your tawdry dalliance is what keeps me up at night?” He laughed. “I’m long past that. This has nothing to do with you, princess, what’s happening now. So go put on your silk gloves and pretend you’re a fine lady, go tend to your little business, whatever it is. I stopped thinking about you long ago. The world is in dire upheaval while you waltz around with your head in the clouds pretending what’s happening with us is about some degrading personal bullshit! I don’t give a shit about personal. Can’t you see? The world is being turned upside down. I don’t recognize the world anymore.”

  “Funny, that’s what you said to me when you were falling in love with me on the beach in Hampton.”

  Caught sideways, he breathed out brine and regret before he spoke. “Yes,” he said, panting through his clamped teeth. “And I was right. You turned me inside out, and since then my life has never been the same.”

  “Shut up!
If I hear one more word about all you gave up for me, I will hang myself! You’ve held your sacrifice over me like a bludgeon for thirteen years so you don’t have to do a single blessed thing you don’t want to do. And every time I ask you for the smallest thing, the littlest thing, you beat me over the head with your fucking sacrifice! I’m sick and tired of it. I’m sick and tired of you. What favor do you think you’ve done me?” She was shaking, barely standing, grasping the back of a chair. “With or without you, my life is exactly the same. Worse with you. I’m still with my mother, in Lawrence, broke, without a baby—”

  “And that’s my fault?”

  She burst into tears.

  He took one step toward her. “I’m s—”

  She put her hands up to stop him. “Get away from me. Even when you’re here, you’re not here, except to make a dire mess of all things.”

  He stepped away. “Don’t worry, soon you’ll be without me. So no more mess. All good?”

  “It’ll be better than this. Anything would be better than this.”

  “Right. And I won’t fret about you. I know that while I’m in prison you’ll find a way to comfort yourself.”

  She slapped him across the face. He let her. They stood glaring at each other, panting.

  “You gave away your married body and I’m the one getting slapped?”

  “I thought you didn’t give a shit about it?”

  “And you believed me?”

  They made crashing savage piercing love with the doors closed, the windows shuttered, trying not to scream through their antagonism in the sweltering dog day afternoon.

  “Why won’t you leave me?” She breathed out, parched and spent. “You want to. You’ve wanted to for so long. You have friends that don’t include me, a life that doesn’t include me. You’re fomenting trouble while I spin and toil. Why won’t you go?”

  “I’ll ask you the same question. Why won’t you go?”

  “Where am I going to go? My life is here.”

  “Mine too.”

  They fell quiet, clammy with their exertions.

  “You’ve really done it this time,” she said. “Really done it. The Sedition Act is implacable and you’ve flagrantly transgressed it.”

  “I hate their laws, I find them loathsome. I fight on the side only of what’s right.”

  “You’re standing on a soapbox in the middle of war, supporting Lenin and yelling for the overthrow of the U.S. government.”

  “Yes. Like Lenin, I believe it’s morally wrong to send young men to war to fight for a cause no one, not the President, not Congress, not the hawks, the economists, or any of the politicians can even articulate. Imperial internationalist finance capital is as good a reason as any. No one can explain to anyone else why we are sending our young men to be slaughtered in Europe. Can you?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Oh, you’d care if you had a son.”

  She tore away from him, but he grabbed her and bound her close.

  “Nowhere to go,” Harry whispered, holding her down, climbing on top of her. “Shackled together for life, you and I, and the chains are eating away into your lovely ankles.”

  Eventually, when they were good and done, he released her, and she crawled to the edge of their small bed and curled into a ball, her back to him.

  “We’re done,” he said.

  “We’ve been done a long time.” She emitted a shallow groan. “And we didn’t even know it.”

  Five

  A MONTH LATER, IN September 1918, Harry, Eugene Debs, and Emma Goldman were convicted under the Sedition Act for hindering the recruitment at a military station, attacking a police officer, and propagating vicious lies against the U.S. government. Their looming punishment was ten years without parole. It was better than the twenty-year sentence Bill Haywood received. Big Bill was found guilty of a total of ten thousand counts of sedition. Twenty years seemed a light penalty in his case.

  Harry’s sentencing was in December, but his bail in the meantime had been raised to an unattainable ten thousand dollars because the district attorney deemed Harry a flight risk, and this time, the judge agreed. They returned to Gina the original bail amount, and she paid everyone back except the pawnshop. She had ninety days to buy back her ring, and it had been one hundred and thirty-seven. There was no way she could pay the interest and storage charges on it past the ninety days to keep it in the shop indefinitely. She barely had enough money for the bus to Concord each week.

  Gina had asked him last time he was incarcerated in Concord why he never wrote to her, and he said it was because she would find their visits a lot less interesting if he bombarded her with words in the in-between days, but she recalled their Sunday visits, him sitting across from her, peeking at her through the diamond mesh of the steel partition, reading the newspaper, commenting on the week’s events, talking about the laundry, the awful food, and wondered if that was true.

  Weeks into his imprisonment in October, Harry finally wrote to Gina.

  Don’t come visit me. It’s best you stay away. Don’t take me too seriously, but no one writes letters anymore. It’s becoming a lost art. We scribble now, dictate commands. I’m sorry I’m not more charming. But it’s difficult to be amiable when around me everyone is falling like flies from the Spanish flu. If you come, you’re sure to get sick. I don’t want you to fall sick. I’m in a fog as to how you feel about me, after all the words you screamed at me in August, which sounded too much like the bitter truth. Perhaps I will get sick, and clarify your heart in the process. Maybe I’ll drop dead. Would you find that appealing? Perhaps I’m not being artful enough, but what I’m trying to say is, then you won’t even have to feel guilty about not visiting me. If the ditch digger perchance happens to return home again at the precise moment when I’m conveniently in prison, please give him my regards.

  But Gina barely registered Harry’s ill-tempered letter. She was worried about her mother.

  Six

  MIMOO COULDN’T GET OUT of bed. She kept vomiting, couldn’t keep anything down, not even water. She couldn’t move her frail body. Gina couldn’t work the looms at the mission or the sewing machines at the mending room because she had to stay home to take care of her mother. Salvo took time off from Purity for a day here, a day there, but it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t take time off and be the only breadwinner for his sister and mother. The Sodality Sisters began a collection to help Gina pay the rent and buy food. But it wasn’t enough. The mission got involved. Father O’Reilly got involved.

  When it looked as if Mimoo had caught pneumonia, Gina borrowed money from Rita for a taxi and took her mother to the Lawrence hospital. She never left her side.

  “Mimoo,” Gina said on a dark and quiet evening, sitting by her mother. “You say you know everything—why haven’t I been able to carry a baby? What’s wrong with me?”

  “Child, I don’t have all the answers. Pray to the good Lord for guidance. I thought for a long time it was because you didn’t want a child. You know that God in His infinite wisdom wouldn’t want to give you something He knew you didn’t want.”

  “You know I did, Mimoo,” Gina whispered. “What you’re saying is not true. I wanted one desperately. I still want one.”

  Mimoo leveled a weak look at her daughter. “Good luck with that, now that your husband is in prison for the rest of your child-bearing life.”

  Oh, Mimoo.

  Oh, Harry.

  “You and your Emma Goldman, you and your Margaret Sanger. They’re in jail too, just like that husband of yours. None of you believe in children.”

  “I do. Maybe not they. But I do.”

  “Well,” said Mimoo. She was wheezing, struggling to breathe. “No use talking about pointless things now. Your ship has sailed and is sitting in the pokey until 1928. Don’t be glum. You’ll have other joys.”

  Like what? Gina wanted to ask, but didn’t.

  “Don’t leave me, Mama.”

  Mimoo placed her cold, worn-out hand on
her daughter’s wet face. Rales, abnormal sounds, rose from her chest. The skin was blue on her once olive face. “The greatest joy I have in my life is being your mother. Despite everything.”

  A few hours later Mimoo bled from her mouth, gasping for air, unable to breathe, suffocating, not breathing. From beginning to end, barely a week, a faint candle flame.

  Seven

  GINA WAS WRETCHEDLY THROWING up in the hospital lavatory, with her mother five doors away, untaken. She could hear her brother in the corridor sobbing. A nurse passing by said she should see a doctor. A mask was on her face. Gina put her own mask on. “What’s happening?” she asked the doctor who came to record the time and cause of Maria Attaviano’s death. Gina had been crying so hard and throwing up that her eyes were bloodshot. The doctor took one look at her and hurried to put his mask on. “No one is going to make it,” he told her, “absolutely no one, if you don’t get yourself into isolation immediately. You can’t be in the hospital coughing like that. What are you doing, making yourself sick, vomiting everywhere? Get control of yourself! Your mother got the flu. Millions of people are infected all over the Eastern seaboard. Tens of thousands have already died. Stay away from hospitals. Hospitals are hotbeds of germ activity. And this germ travels fast and is lethal. Have you not been reading the papers?”

  Newspapers brought her nothing but bad news. She had deliberately stopped reading them after Harry went away.

  Half of Lawrence turned out for Mimoo’s funeral. They all took up a collection for the priest and the cemetery. Luigi, the local coffin maker, made Mimoo a wooden casket free of charge for all the pasta sauce Gina had given him over the years. Father O’Reilly performed the service. All the bingo ladies from the parish sat in the front pews weeping. But other people were sick, too. You couldn’t miss the haunted faces, the translucent skin, the coughing. Something terrible was going around, something no one had seen before. Mimoo’s multitude of friends memorialized her, buried her, all walked in a procession after the casket to St. Mary’s Cemetery, all crossed themselves and sang Ave Maria, but Gina could tell that they were crying for Mimoo while thinking, Who’s next? Do I have what she had? She worked last week, and five days later she’s dead. What is happening? Will it happen to me?