Bellagrand Read online

  Five

  THE ONLY THING THAT marred the idyll was the occasional rumble between Herman and Harry, like the South Florida weather with its distant but daily sound of afternoon thunder. Gina had mentioned this to Esther, about the way the two men kept bickering about all manner of things petty and small, and Esther laughed. “Darling, that’s not bickering. That’s them getting along like wood and matches. If they’re arguing, it means all is well with the world. It’s when they don’t talk that you’ve got to worry.”

  Gina wasn’t convinced. “It doesn’t seem like they’re sorting out their differences. It’s more as if they’re showcasing them. Neither gives an inch.”

  Esther nodded. “Harry is his father’s son through and through. The more he doesn’t give in, the more proud Father is.”

  “I don’t think Harry knows that,” said Gina. “I’m fairly certain he doesn’t.”

  “Yes,” Esther said, “Harry’s always been the last one to see the truth of anything.”

  “Maybe we should ask Salvo, our new expert on all things real estate, to have Bellagrand appraised,” Herman said one fine evening after a late lobster dinner when they were sitting outside on the screened-in lanai while Alexander, unmindful of the evening flies by the pond, was attempting to find a wooden stick for himself so he could walk like his grandfather. “The bank had estimated the house’s value when they extended you the line of credit, Harry, but that was a couple of years ago. Prices have been booming. Perhaps Salvo can update us, tell us something concrete.”

  “I’m sure he can, Herman,” Gina said when Harry didn’t immediately answer. “He’ll be here tomorrow for Sunday dinner. We’ll ask him.”

  Harry grunted. “How’s Salvo going to help?” This seemed to be directed at Herman, though Gina could not say for sure. “There is nothing concrete about the price of a house.”

  “Come again?”

  “Never mind.”

  “What do you mean, son?” said Herman. “This house has value. That value is expressed in price. How can anything be more concrete than that?”

  “You know what the word price is short for? Caprice.”

  “Oh, here we go,” muttered Gina, motioning to Esther to help her clear the table. They had sent Carmela home early.

  “I don’t follow,” Herman said, sitting up straighter in his chair.

  “Prices are arbitrary,” Harry said. “They can be set high to make maximum profit for the owner of this house.”

  “Which is you.”

  Harry shrugged. “I’m indifferent to that, Father, as you know. The house is like a widget. The workers who made this widget can’t afford to buy it. That I’m not indifferent to.”

  “Well, yes. Many people can’t buy boats or diamond rings. What does that prove? That we shouldn’t have boats or diamond rings?”

  Gina hid the hand with her ring on it. Harry blinked. “No, but it proves that price is set arbitrarily.”

  Herman chuckled. “Are you saying that nothing has intrinsic value?”

  “Not at all. Things you can’t put a price on have intrinsic value. Like babies. Things you can put a price on have arbitrary value. Like houses.”

  Who was going to disagree with him there? thought Gina. Except in her mind, both things had value.

  “Have you ever seen a profit and loss statement for a business, Harry?” Herman asked. “In Salvo’s restaurants perhaps? I think you’re confused about your terms.”

  “I’m not at all.”

  “Oh, I’m certain of it,” said Herman. “You’re confusing prices with costs. They’re not synonymous.”

  “I know. The cost of this house is X. The price of this house is a capricious Y.”

  Herman took a cheerful last sip of his mojito and motioned to Gina for one more. “If prices are arbitrary, then, by your logic, wages are also arbitrary.”

  “Aren’t they?”

  “Are they? Why did Wood Mill pay your wife X amount of dollars per week? Why not pay her half of X? Or a quarter of X?”

  “Precisely! Why not twice X? Or three times X?”

  “But why so low, son?” Herman asked with amusement. “Why not pay Gina twenty times X to work in the mending room?”

  “Exactly. And you know someone is getting twenty times X, just not Gina.”

  Herman turned to Gina. “Gina, why didn’t your brother pay the pizza baker twenty times X?”

  Gina was making the rum and mint drinks by the high table. “Ask your son, Herman, not me,” she replied. “He paid the pizza baker twenty times X.”

  “And where did that bring you?”

  “To bankruptcy.”

  “Precisely. Because Harry separated prices from costs by making one arbitrary and the other not. To pay the baker twenty times X, he would’ve had to raise the price of the pizza to twenty times X.”

  “But that would have run us out of business in five minutes.”

  Herman nodded. “What was it that I was saying about prices expressing the intrinsic value of things?”

  “Father, you’re drifting away from my original point about Bellagrand,” Harry said, as Gina watched his rigid features. “You can’t charge twenty times X . . .”

  “Don’t be stuck on twenty. It can be two. Or three hundred and two. Why can’t it be any number at all?” Herman asked. “If you think the price of a widget is arbitrary, then the wage to make that widget can be arbitrary.”

  “Two different things.”

  “Relating to exactly the same thing,” Herman said. “The cost per unit of widget. In fine-tuning the balance between price and cost, only the fluctuating market can tell you if you’re charging too much. Do you know how? No one will buy it, and you’ll be out of business.” He nodded to Gina to thank her for the mojito she brought over to him. “Ask four million dollars for this house. Or forty million. See if someone will bite.”

  “Or I can ask fifty dollars and everyone will bite,” said Harry.

  “But then how are you going to pay your electrician and your mason twenty times X as you wish? The mason’s salary and the price of the house are inextricably related. Almost like the gravitational force in physics. The heavier the thing is, the more it’s forced into the ground. Make it lighter and you’ll have to put weights on it to keep it from flying into the sky.”

  “Father,” Harry said, “none of this is my point.”

  “Fine,” Herman said agreeably. “Let’s take Bellagrand as your point.”

  “I’m saying that the gap between the rich and poor is widening because capitalism is inequitable and inefficient, and one of the things that’s expressed in is price. But now, in contrast, let’s look at Russia. To concentrate the power in the hands of one party devoted single-mindedly to preserving the fundamental rights of man and extending his happiness, that’s what I’m wholeheartedly advocating.”

  There was a baffled silence.

  Harry amended. “I mean not anymore. I had been advocating it. I meant to say devil-advocating. I’m reformed now, Father, Gina, please don’t worry. I won’t let you down.” He forced a smile. “I’m still the objection maker, though. You’re all right with that, aren’t you?”

  Less agreeably Herman tapped the table. “If we’re just advocating and objection making, you won’t mind if I advocate right back?”

  “When do you ever not? Please go ahead.”

  “Two things. You said something about happiness. Shall we allow that in Russia it might be too early to tell? Because from where I’m sitting, the Russian peasant’s two greatest joys, outside of his own body, are the market and the church. And your Vladimir Ilyich Lenin seems to be devoting his life to depriving the peasant of these two foundations.”

  “It’s not the only thing he’s doing,” Harry said.

  Troubled, Gina glanced at Esther, but Harry’s sister was unperturbed, as if she’d heard it all before.

  “Oh?” said Herman. “Because it sure seems like it is. From where I’m sitting. But the second thing. You sa
y the market is wasteful and inefficient. Let me ask you—the suit you’re wearing, how did it get on your body? The threads that made it, the yarn that spun it, the looms and the mills, and the cotton or wool that made the yarn, the fields that the cotton grew on, tell me, how did you just happen to put this suit on your body this morning? Or for that matter, how did you, when you were an urban man living in a building in a big town or a man of leisure like now, living in a small town, happen to get up in the morning and cut yourself a piece of bread and put it into your mouth? Did you get up extra early and ride out west to Iowa to your own wheat field? Did you thresh it today, mill it, bleach it, make flour from it, combine it with an egg from your handy and nearby chicken, milk your cow and churn your butter and then bake it in your self-made kiln? And if not, then how did this bread that appeared miraculously at your doorstep get to you?”

  “Salvo made it.”

  Gina and Esther laughed.

  “And then he brought it to my doorstep,” Harry added, smiling himself.

  “Where did he get the grain?” Herman asked. “We know Salvo didn’t grow it, so how did it get to him? By train? That other men built? The roads, the railroads, the cars, the threshers, the grain elevators all built by other men? Last night you slept in a bed with white sheets, and you had running water that came through a pipe. Where did these sheets come from? How did the pipe make its way into your house? For that matter, how did the water?”

  Harry listened to him. “Father, I’m getting weary. What does any of this have to do with what I’m talking about, with what John Reed was talking about and fighting for?” Harry paused. “And dying for?”

  Herman stretched back, crossing his arms behind his head. “I don’t know what your John Reed died for. Nothing, I should think. He got sick and died. But I’m answering your original complaint. You said capitalism was wasteful and inefficient. I found your argument faulty and explained to you how the free market is the emperor of efficiency.”

  “Yes, but everything you mention was built on the backs of slogging workers! That’s always been my only point.”

  “Who pays the workers?”

  “This entire American civilization is built on Mimoo’s back and Gina’s back, while all the profits go into the pockets of people who don’t work on the railroad tracks.”

  “Profits into the pockets of people like Henry Flagler?” Herman spoke the name almost without flinching or pausing. “What profit did Flagler see from this house? He built it over thirty years ago, invested his own money, used the finest materials, as you can see by the slate under your feet and the marble in your bathroom, paid the architects and the electricians their wages, and then—what? The house cost money, Harry. Flagler, I, we reached into our pockets plenty, and sometimes we didn’t make a nickel.” Herman smiled warmly. “In fact, the only one who appears to have reaped any profit from Flagler’s very private capital expenditure is you.” Herman sat back. “Must gall you a little, doesn’t it, my son?”

  Harry stood up from the table, exasperated by his father’s good humor. “I just want Gina and Fernando to be paid better. Is that so unreasonable?”

  “Without capital first and revenue second, there are no wages. Gina can’t get paid. Neither can Fernando.”

  “The state also has capital.” Harry went to pour himself a whiskey from the bar.

  “Where does the state get money from?”

  A balky Harry didn’t answer.

  “I’m asking, Harry,” persisted Herman. “Where does the state get the money to build something like Bellagrand?”

  “The same place Flagler got it from.”

  “Savings, then? Returns on risky ventures all over the Eastern seaboard?”

  “Why not?”

  “In other words, profits?”

  “It wouldn’t be profits, Father, if the state held the purse strings.” Harry downed his whiskey and poured another. “Rather, it would be profits that were distributed evenly among the people who built this house.”

  “Well, first of all, to build this house back in 1890, workers had to be paid then, yet there is no profit on the house to this day. But let’s say Flagler sold it instead of just giving it to Mrs. X.” No one at the table acknowledged who this Mrs. X might have been. “Let’s say he needed the money, and he sold it. If the profits from that sale were distributed between the painters and the door hangers, where would the capital to build Whitehall after Bellagrand come from?”

  “How is that my concern? Who cares about Whitehall?”

  “Not me by any stretch,” Herman said, “but salaried workers built Whitehall, too. Where did the capital to build Bellagrand come from? If Flagler gave away the profits he made on the railroads and the oil, there would be no Bellagrand. No reinvestment, or construction, or development. There would be no Palm Beach, no St. Augustine, no Miami, no Port of Key West. No wages, no profits, no business. No investment equals no future.”

  “You’re just arguing yourself into a corner here,” Harry said.

  “I’m arguing myself into a corner?”

  “Yes! There would be plenty of other money.”

  “From where?”

  “Russia has money,” Harry said. “They’re doing right now, this moment, what you say can’t be done. They’re doing it.”

  “Harry, Russia repudiated all of its foreign debt. They called it illegitimate. Imagine if any other government or business was run like that. That’s one way they have capital. The other way is, they have taken over, by force, what private businesses have built with private funds. They appropriated property and real estate—land, farms, factories—that belonged to the Russian people, the same way they appropriated borrowed foreign money and called it their own. There’s another word for what they did both in Russia and abroad.” Herman stared pointedly at Harry. “It escapes me right now.”

  “Say what you like, Father, against Russia,” Harry said, “but private capital is a poisonous thing, Bellagrand notwithstanding and besides the point.”

  “We started with Bellagrand,” Herman said gently, “and now it’s besides the point?”

  “Russia is still in the middle of a civil war! After they’re victorious and the rest of the world has left them alone, let’s watch them awhile and see what happens. Let’s reserve our judgment until we see their grand experiment played out. They have capital now, however acquired, they own the means of production. Let’s watch them industrialize, collectivize, organize. Until we see what happens to the Russian economy under the new command structure, nothing you can say, no fake facts you can throw at me will make me believe otherwise. I know what the truth is going to be. The question is, why don’t you?”

  Herman struggled up from the table. “Dear boy,” he said. “But without the capitalists to demonize, who would you rob?”

  And to Gina he uttered a worrying quote before he kissed her hand goodnight and headed upstairs: “No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

  “What did your father mean by that, Harry?” Gina asked later as they got into bed.

  “I think he was talking about himself, Gia.”

  She shook her head. “He must believe you’re hiding something.”

  “I’m an open book. Come here. I’ll show you what my page is open to.”

  Yet despite all the objection-making and paternal concern Herman had for Harry’s future, like birds of winter that flew south to stay, they all lived together in the great big house and fished and ate and swam and went to Spanish City. Herman, Alexander, and Harry built benches together and gardens, swimming platforms, koi ponds, and toy chests. The adults took the child to Alligator Joe’s gator farm on the Jungle Trail, where they had a lunch of oysters while Alligator Joe showed the fearless, fascinated Alexander his largest gators. In the mornings, Herman went off with Salvo and Alexander to show houses and to get a glimpse of how the other beautiful people lived. Af
terward they met up with Gina and Esther and drove down to Palm Beach where they sat outside at the Breakers and had lunch in the briny air by the ocean. Herman and Salvo took Alexander swimming in the barely there waves of the Atlantic, while Gina and Esther sat and watched until it started to rain. Alexander showed Herman and Harry and Salvo how to catch a tree-climbing crab. He climbed a moss oak himself, and Salvo had to go get him, though he did offer the rescue duties to Esther, who politely declined, because she was wearing a skirt, she said, and it wouldn’t be proper.

  For Alexander’s second birthday, they had soft-shell crabs, shrimp and steak shish kebabs, and a strawberry cake with whipped cream. Herman taught Alexander how to build a fire and how to swim in the large pool on that lit-up birthday night. Herman stood close to him in the water, hands outstretched, and Alexander kept pushing him away, yelling, I can do it, Gampa, I can do it.

  “Do you want to hear my Rose Hawthorne thought for the day?” Gina said to Harry. They were sitting on the evening patio, in a wooden swing, intertwined around each other, drinking Cuban rum and Coke, watching Herman and Alexander frolic under the stars and the lights. Slowly a sloop drifted by, adorned with festive sparkles, festive people. The music pounded out the beats of Gina’s calm and blissful heart. In the morning, in the evening, ain’t we got fun . . .

  “Oh, the Rose sayings are back, are they?” Harry smiled. “I wondered when they would rear their heads. Dad! Catch him!” He jumped up, hands outstretched. Alexander had vaulted off the diving board into the deep end without a flotation device.

  Everything was fine. He sat back down.

  Gina nuzzled him with kisses.

  “What’s that for?”

  “You just called him Dad. I could cry.”

  Harry stared unblinking at the two shadows, large and small, in the pool’s limpid waters. “What’s the Rose quote?”

  “Our creator would never have made such lovely days and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.”