Bellagrand: A Novel (35 page)

“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

T
OTAL
E
CLIPSE OF THE
S
ON

One

I
N 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 be 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.

Suddenly light. The midwife, whose name escapes her, and the doctor, whose name escapes her, are smiling over her, and on her chest lies a squirming creature with a shock of hair and length in the limbs, and she almost hears something now, almost . . . She closes her eyes.

When she opens them again, a man stands by her side, smiling the biggest smile of them all. He bends over and kisses her deeply. Such liberties! What is his name? She can’t recall. Oh, yes. Harry.

“Gia,” Harry says, kissing her face, wiping her brow, beaming. “I’m sorry, but you were saying, you’re going to name the baby girl—what? I can’t remember the name we picked out for our daughter. Can you remind me?”

Why is he smiling like that? Like the cat that ate the canary.

Gina looks at her baby.

It’s not a girl.

The May 29, 1919, universe-changing total eclipse of the sun tested and proved the theory of relativity and won Albert Einstein a Nobel prize. The eclipse that made him an instant celebrity and a household name all over the world was one of the longest on record, lasting nearly seven minutes. Gina’s labor, unforeseen by everyone but Harry, lasted uncomfortably longer. The angles of a triangle no longer added up to one hundred and eighty degrees. The uneclipsed sun was low in the sky when a boy came into the world in the blue master bedroom of Bellagrand, in a mansion built for Harry’s mother by a man not Harry’s father. The boy warped space and time by the mass of his gravitational force and bent light around them.

Two

“IT’S A BOY!” HARRY SAID
. “How can that be? Prophet Fernando told me that was impossible. So did you, the Sicilian soothsayer.” He was lying on his side on the bed next to her. There was no one else in the room but the three of them.

Gina didn’t answer, the baby cleaned up, wrapped up, deep in her arms. “How can I have a boy?” she whispered. “I am my mother’s daughter. I only know girls. What am I going to do with a boy?”

“I don’t know. What would you do with a girl? Feed her. Change her.”

“What about after that?”

“I can’t think past today.” Harry waited for just a moment. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Can I hold him?”

“In a minute.” She coughed. “What’s wrong with my voice?”

“Maybe you strained it.”

“I was loud?”

“A bit.”

Evening fell. Night went by. Did they even sleep? The baby slept.

She couldn’t look away from him, cradling him to her chest. She prayed for relief, for forgiveness. She prayed her thanks. She cried for her mother, she wished her mother could see him, could see her child’s child, hold her child’s child. Perhaps she still can. Gina lifted the baby into the air. He’s here, Mimoo. Our boy is here.
Grazie, più misericordioso Dio.

She tried to feed him. She tried to wake him, open his eyes. She couldn’t sleep because she was listening to his breathing. It was too quiet, and it disquieted her.

Can I hold him?

In a minute.

I waited our whole marriage to have this child, she wanted to say. There is a good chance I will not have another. This may be the only time I will hold a baby.

Me too, Gia.

Oh, she was speaking out loud; he could hear her. She couldn’t even hear her own voice.

In the morning Harry went downstairs. He called Boston, informed everyone, even Salvo, smoked a Cuban cigar, courtesy of Fernando, ate, read the paper. He came back upstairs with sweet bread and coffee.

Gina had not moved from her spot on the bed, sitting halfway up on the pillows, the baby on her chest, mother and son stomach to stomach, both almost sleeping.

Harry fell on the bed next to them, sulky like a child.

“Careful!”

“Maybe I can hold him?”

“Okay. When he wakes up.” Still a rasp.

“You’re going to ruin him.”

“Ruin him with love?”

“He slept on your stomach all night. As if he is still inside the womb. I know it’s nice there, but come on . . .”

“Now he is outside.” Both her hands were on the baby. She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t drink. She opened her mouth and Harry gave her drink.

The baby was the largest the midwife had ever delivered. The baby was the largest the doctor had ever seen. There had been no complications, but the midwife had called for the doctor anyway, just in case.

“Soon he’ll be too big to carry,” said Harry.

“But not yet, right?”

“What are you going to do then?”

“I’ll continue to carry him.”

“Until he is twenty? Twenty-five?”

“Wouldn’t I be a lucky mother if he let me?”

Harry gazed longingly at the dark-headed sleeping infant face down on Gina’s chest. “We don’t have a contingency plan for a boy,” he said. “Is Grace a boy’s name, too?”

“No. We will call him Anthony Alexander Barrington. After my father and brother. We’ll call him Alexander.”

“Um, don’t I get a say in this?”

“No.”

The boy stirred, started to cry.

“Perhaps he’s protesting,” Harry said. “Perhaps he’d like to be called Harrison.”

“Harrison Barrington?” She laughed throatily. Her voice seemed to be stuck in low octaves.

“Horatio Barrington?”

“Like Britain’s naval hero? You, a pacifist, want to name your son after a legendary military officer?”

“No, no, you’re right, that’s so wrong.” He stared at her fondly. “I didn’t realize, my Sicilian peasant girl, you are so well versed in British military history.”

“I studied the French Revolution at Simmons. Napoleon came right after. Remember I told you how little I thought of Max Robespierre?”

“What does that have to do with . . .”

“He was so somber and humorless,” she continued softly over the baby, coughing to clear her voice every sentence. “Not a hint of parody within. What woman could ever love him, I thought. He was so joyless in his murderous splendor.”

“Um . . .”

“But Nelson! There was a
man
for you. Did you know he was loved by only the most beautiful woman in England? Some say in all the world.”

“Like me?” Harry smiled. “
Ecco sei bella.
”

“You goose. No. Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton,” Gina said dreamily.

“Ah, good. Another H name. How about Hamilton Barrington?”

“At least you’re funny—unlike Robespierre.”

“I’m not actually trying to be funny,” said Harry. “I’m trying to continue the long-standing tradition of H names in the Barrington family.”

“I didn’t realize it was that important to you.”

“Neither did I.” Harry paused. “Until now.”

The baby stirred, got agitated, excited. Harry stirred, got agitated, excited.

They lay the baby on his back on the bed, uncovered him from his swaddling blankets, bent over him.

After a few moments of watching the boy squirm and wail, Harry spoke. “Why does he have to look exactly like you?”