Bellagrand Page 30

  “My wife also makes her own tomato paste,” Harry said, his eyes twinkling. “I help her with that.” Gina, lush and abundant in her organdy and muslin embroidered pastel ensemble, was pruning the orange trees nearby so she could listen in, and she shook her fist at him in mock outrage, grinning like a happy child.

  “You should mow your own grass, Mr. Barrington,” Janke repeated. “You worked in the laundry room in prison, didn’t you?”

  “Do you want me to mow the grass or do the laundry?”

  “Both. Why not? You have time. You learned your way around the laundry room quite well. I know, I have your prison reports from MCI.”

  “Is this MCI? I worked the laundry room so I could buy smokes.”

  “Without work, man is incomplete. Man is nothing,” Janke said. “Look at your wife.”

  “I’m looking.” His eyes smiled at her. Her eyes adored on him.

  “Look how many hats she wears. She is always cleaning something, cooking, fixing, sewing, mending. Now she prunes. Do you see?”

  “Also shopping. She’s doing quite a lot of that. Also creating human life,” Harry added. “Doing a marvelous amount of that, too. As you can see.”

  “If you don’t occupy yourself, Mr. Barrington, if you don’t find some motion in your life, very soon you will find yourself weary, gloomy, fretful, and vexated.”

  Harry stood from his mosaic table where they had been sitting, having iced tea. “Officer Janke,” he said. The twinkle faded from his eyes. “Don’t misquote Blaise Pascal to me. If there is one thing I know it’s my French mathematicians. I am never idle, not for one minute of any day. I don’t have enough hours to do all the things I want to do. I don’t have enough minutes to read the books I want to read, to think about them, to write synopses of what I read in the journal I keep for that purpose. Pascal talked about man being completely at rest without passion and without study. That is not me. It’s never been me. I am brimming with passion.”

  “For all the wrong things, Mr. Barrington.”

  “Also, for some of the right things, Officer Janke.” A glance at the overflowing woman standing and grimly listening with shears in her hands. “But your job here is not to judge my business or my diversions.”

  “My job is to prepare you for the outside world, which you’re going to reenter in less than three years’ time.”

  “No,” said Harry. “Your job is to be my warden. That is all. I prepare myself. I am not weak, nor empty. I rejoice in the world. My heart is not weary. I have no gloom. I wake up every morning just after dawn and can’t wait to begin my daily purpose.”

  “Do you feel you have purpose, Mr. Barrington?”

  “Without question, Officer Janke. My purpose is not yours—to spy on an adult man in the prime of his life to make sure he doesn’t wander too far from the plantation. But I will stand up for my work every day. I am preparing myself for a new life, for a new law. I recognize the life my wife and I had been living in Lawrence is done with. I understand there will come a time when other things will be required of me. So I work now at what I can, and I don’t despair as I wait for the bright future.”

  Janke said nothing, her skeptical gaze on his affronted tanned, slender frame.

  “I will not train in Bellagrand to be a parole officer,” Harry said, “if I interpret your critical gaze correctly.”

  “You interpret it incorrectly.”

  “I will not be a jailer. When this brief period of isolation is over, my wife and I and our soon-to-be-born offspring will have a whole life still ahead of us. I am preparing myself now for that time. So I can be the best husband I can be, the best father I can be. What you judge as my stillness, I know is fullness, and an active interest in the world around me.”

  Gina stepped up to the table. “Excuse me, Harry, may I?”

  With a light bow he took a step back.

  “I wear many hats, you’re right, Officer Janke,” Gina said, metal shears open and flashing in her hands. “One of them is defending my husband. Leave him alone. You are not a philosopher. You are a warden. So come on Mondays and ward. And you are quite wrong about him. What you perceive as fruits of his idleness are actually the fruits of his solitude. Now, is there anything else we can get you before you go?”

  Six

  HARRY WAS KISSING HER awake, then shaking her awake. “It’s after two, Sleeping Beauty. Do you want to have lunch?”

  “I can’t believe I’ve slept so long,” she muttered, needing his help to lift herself out of the hammock.

  “You’re like a turtle on your back,” he said, rubbing her belly and hoisting her under her arms. “I can’t imagine this is not going to get funnier as you get bigger.”

  “I can’t imagine getting bigger,” she said, stretching and walking to the house with him.

  “That’s true. You’re as big as Bellagrand.”

  “I’m starved, is what I am. Did Emilio make lunch?”

  “He didn’t,” said Harry, but before she could open her mouth to complain, he added, “I did.”

  “You what?”

  “Oh goodness, why are you crying?”

  Harry had made them a feast: shrimp and avocado salad and cucumber-and-cream-cheese sandwiches. They ate on the veranda. From across the water, Gina could hear the plaintive sounds of Spanish guitar. They ate in near silence, making the smallest of small talk.

  “It’s good to be alone together, live alone together.”

  Reaching over, Harry fondled her belly, her ample breasts, molasses-dark from the sun. “Clearly we managed to be alone together before, otherwise I’d still be in jail, and you’d be mending dresses in your Portuguese mill.”

  She was happy to have him be light with her, jolly. “Do you realize,” she said to him, her mouth full of watermelon, “that if I hadn’t hocked my wedding ring to make your bail, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now? I wouldn’t be pregnant, we wouldn’t have Bellagrand.” She shook her head, reaching for another slice. “It was terrible to give it up. But look what I have instead.” She gazed at him, then reached out to caress his sandpapery cheek with her sugary hand. He said nothing.

  She waited. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”

  “What should I say?”

  “I don’t know. Something. Anything. I wasn’t talking to the herons on the dock.”

  “Indeed. I figure I’d better keep silent. A minute ago you were weeping like a willow over a cucumber inside a piece of bread. So I can’t say what I want to say because you won’t stop crying until May, if then, and I’ll never get any peace.”

  “Harry! Say.”

  “I don’t want to make you cry.”

  “Please, mio diletto,” she whispered. “Make me cry.”

  He said he would be right back and disappeared. She waited, finishing her watermelon, looking out onto the water. When he came back, he went around to her chair and kneeled down on one knee on the limestone veranda.

  “What are you . . .”

  He handed her a small gift-wrapped box.

  Her hands dripped with watermelon juice. She didn’t even open the box before she cried.

  “Do you see why I wanted to say nothing?”

  “Oh, Harry. What did you do?”

  “I don’t know. Are you going to sit and cry or are you going to open it?”

  “I’m going to sit and cry,” she said, sitting and crying.

  After she wiped her hands, she opened the little black box. Inside, sitting in blue velvet was her two-carat diamond betrothal ring, sparkling, shining.

  Open-mouthed, she stared at the ring, at him, still on his knee in front of her.

  “What’s happening?” she said. “Is this a magic trick? I don’t understand.”

  “It’s your ring, Gia.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “And yet.”

  “Harry, it’s impossible! It’s a sleight of hand.”

  “And yet . . .”

  “I lost that ring.”


  “You didn’t lose it.”

  “It’s not the same ring.”

  “Do you want to read the inscription inside it?”

  She couldn’t read the inscription through the tears in her eyes. Harry had to read it to her. Gia, it said, amica mia, mia bella.

  When she stopped crying long enough to listen, Harry told her that in January, before they left for Florida, he had asked his sister to go to Lawrence to the pawnshop to see if the ring was still unsold and if it was, he asked her to buy it back. “I know you couldn’t ask my sister,” he said. “But I could. And did.” He wiped her face. “The man told Esther the reason the ring didn’t sell was because he had raised the price beyond what anyone was willing to pay for it.”

  “Why would he do that? Why did he do that?”

  “He did it,” said Harry, “because he remembered you and thought that if anyone was going to come back for a ring like that it would be a girl like you, so he raised the price and kept it safe until you could.”

  Gina was weeping.

  “Why did you wait so long to give it to me?”

  “I wanted to wait until our anniversary in June, but you mentioned the ring, so what could I do? Besides, what if when the baby comes you won’t care about rings anymore, or love, or Harry? I heard that can happen.”

  “Il mio cuore, that will never happen.”

  There was music in the house, from restless jazz on the radio, from Gina’s attempts to play Esther’s Schumann’s Traumerei, to Fernando’s Spanish-tinged guitar easing out a slow habanera. Fernando sat in the marble courtyard, smoked, and strummed his Cuban childhood through their palms and walkways. The sun shined morning to night, there were whooshing fans and clanging knives and slamming drawers. There was life. They planted inkberry in the loamy earth, and tomatoes for later in the summer after the baby came when they could make paste again from homegrown, not market-bought tomatoes. Together they made luscious sauce, and had pasta with garlic, clams and shrimp, vegetable lasagna, capellini primavera. He drank red wine and kissed her with the opulent juice still on his lips. With his new Kodak Brownie he took photographs of her that he never developed, the film thrown into the drawer until later, the later that never came. Harry said he didn’t know how Gina could show herself at the public market. He said being with her was like constantly walking through the red-light district in New Orleans. She was lust on parade. She told him that was the nicest thing anyone said to her.

  Late at night he would draw them a bath and build a fire in the delicate light blue bathroom. He was careful with her, and tender. He soaped her like he loved her, held her like he loved her, loved her like he loved her. Some nights there was a slight breeze through the darkness past the open windows. The room would be filled with the smell of fragrant soap, salt water, and love, like heady perfume, like opiate.

  March and April dissolved into sweltering May, elusive intimacy, unabated ardor, boat-bobbing bliss.

  The lemonade is made, the sugar bowl is on the table. The sun shines every day and the moon and the stars are out for us at night, she murmurs after him, like a love song.

  Chapter 11

  TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SON

  One

  IN THE MIDDLE OF May the newspapers started counting down to May 29, the day the esteemed weather scientists predicted the sun would be eclipsed by the moon. Not partially eclipsed either. The moon would pass between the earth and the sun, and Jupiter would become invisible even from tropical skies. For a moment, maybe longer, the world around the equator would go completely dark. Gina and Harry’s neighbors to the south, Chuck and Karen, drove their fancy new car into Bellagrand from next door to introduce themselves. They were having a blowout Eclipse Bash, they announced. South Florida, just above the Tropic of Cancer, was going dark. Would Harry and Gina like to join them?

  Chuck and Karen were always having blowout parties. The loud music and clamor of the crowd could be heard twice weekly around the bay, their drunken ardor audible all the way down to Lake Worth. Pleased to be invited, Harry and Gina didn’t want to beg off by admitting that Harry was under house arrest.

  “Thank you,” said Harry, “but as you can see, my wife is about to give birth.”

  She looked colossal, the seams on her voile orchid-print dress tearing under the pressure of late-stage pregnancy.

  “Congratulations. But surely not so soon? Not on Eclipse Day?”

  “I believe it will indeed be on Eclipse Day,” said Harry. “Though her good doctor disagrees.”

  “Doctors don’t know everything, do they?” said Karen, a slim, short-haired, comfortably dressed older woman who was incongruously milk-white in the tropics. “Mine keeps telling me drinking whiskey could be bad for my health.” She laughed heartily. “Yet I’m the picture of vigor.” Her husband stood beside her, affably silent.

  “Doctors may not know everything,” said Gina, “but husbands don’t know everything either.”

  “Yes,” Harry acknowledged. “Sometimes husbands don’t know everything.” He paused. She elbowed him. “But the day of the birth of my first child, I know in here.” He tapped his heart.

  “Well, please do stop by,” said Karen with a wave by the Aphrodite fountain, “if the child reconsiders arriving on party day of all days. Tell it that’s just bad manners.” She laughed and got into her vehicle. “What do you think of our new chariot? We picked it up a week ago.”

  “Beautiful!” Gina called after them. “Careful going out of the gate!”

  “If he waited to arrive on a day other than one of their party days,” Harry said to Gina, watching Chuck and Karen speed away in the electric blue Cadillac Phaeton jalopy, “he’d never arrive, would he?”

  “She would never arrive,” Gina corrected him. “She.”

  On May 29, 1919, Gina woke up around seven and asked Harry, who was already up and by the window, if he could see the solar eclipse from where he stood.

  He said no, but the festivities under way next door made it seem as if Chuck and Karen could see something.

  “They’ve been carousing since yesterday afternoon,” said Gina. “Did you see the damage to our gate? I knew they were going too fast.”

  “What about the damage to their Cadillac? Gouged right down the side.”

  “Should we go?” she asked him. “Might be nice to go to a party. Meet new people. Take our mind off things. We’ve been waiting and waiting. I’m sure Fernando will let you walk next door.”

  “I’m not going next door. Janke hates me. This is exactly the kind of thing she’s looking for. What if there’s a radical at the party? No.” Harry shook his head. “And take our mind off what?”

  “The baby.”

  “We can’t take our mind off the baby, Gina,” said Harry, “because as I told you, you’re having the baby today. It’s time to keep your eyes on the prize.”

  “Oh, Harry,” Gina said, rubbing her hot-air balloon of a belly. “Don’t be a silly sausage. I’m not even close to having the baby.”

  An hour later they went for a swim in the pool because it was so blistering hot out. She was sitting on the stone patio sipping a lemonade, not even bothering to dry off, looking up at the sky, and listening to Harry read to her from the paper about Arthur Eddington of the Royal Astronomical Society in Greenwich, England. Today he was wandering on an island off the coast of equatorial Africa, taking photographs of the solar eclipse because of an untested theory of a patent clerk in Switzerland named Albert Einstein.

  For years, Einstein had been speculating that time and space were not absolutes but instead relative to the gravitational forces of other objects and, more important, relative to the speed with which the other objects traveled. Gravity and motion affected time and space. Only a total solar eclipse would allow Eddington to measure this theoretical deflection of light—the impact of the sun’s gravity on the light of distant stars. If the sun’s rays didn’t bend during the eclipse the way Einstein had postulated, then his theory would be false and he would b
e discredited and disgraced. The world’s eyes were on good old Eddington, who was taking sixteen snapshots of the sun moving out from the shadow of the moon.

  “One-thirty Greenwich Mean Time,” Harry said, looking up at the sky. “That’s eight-thirty in the morning Bellagrand time.” He looked at his watch. “That’s now, Gina. Look up.”

  She shifted in her chair, looked up, it got darker, and suddenly she felt a tremor like a tidal wave flood through her body. Gasping, she nearly fell to the ground. It got darker still. Harry jumped up, paper falling from his lap, took one look at her, and ran to the telephone.

  “Harry, get me upstairs first,” Gina called after him, “but then tell the midwife to hurry.”

  Lucky for them, Carmela and Emilio were in the kitchen. Carmela ordered Harry to remain downstairs while she took Gina up to the bedroom. Gina wanted to protest, reach for Harry, but her mouth wasn’t cooperating, her body busy being swallowed up in a deluge that took away her ability to speak.

  “Why so sudden?” she mouthed to Carmela. “I thought I had some time, no?”

  “Señora, I think your water broke. Did you not feel it break?”

  “No, I got out of the pool.” She panted. “It was hot. I was perspiring.” She doubled back, began inching her way downstairs. “I have to go, Carmela, I think the baby is in the pool. Help me. I left it. She slipped out.”

  “Señora, please come with me.”

  “No, I must go check. I’m here, but she’s there . . .”

  “Señora, right here, into your bedroom. Lie down, I’ll be right back.”

  “Carmela, ask Harry to go get her. Because . . .”

  “You are delusional, shh.”

  “How do you understand what I’m saying? How do I understand you? Are you speaking English?”

  Why was it so dark in the room? Like it was night. What’s happening? Gina looked up at her ceiling—screamed—was drowning—screamed silently like she was underwater.

  The rest she doesn’t remember well.

  She opens her eyes, once twice, there is a man she doesn’t recognize, a woman she’s never seen before, someone bending over her, she tries to remember the name of the man who did this to her so she can kill him, but can’t, whispers, Mimoo, Mimoo, I need my mother. It’s hot and there is a piercing sound, it’s wet, and in the delirium she thinks it’s her. She screams but no sound comes out, she is under the ocean.