Bellagrand: A Novel (56 page)

“She leaves you for Christmas?”

“Not very sporting of her, is it?”

“I should say. She’s in Panama now?”

“Until March.”

Gina hoped this wouldn’t backfire on her, visiting Ben while his wife and children were away.

“So what’s going on, Gia—Gina?” He quickly corrected himself. “Is everything all right?”

She told Ben about the trouble that had brought her to Harvard. “Harry is out of options, Ben. I’m sorry to bother you with it. He has spent nearly two months trying to hire someone, but he can’t find anyone to represent him, and his hearing date is next week. We’ve postponed twice already, but that’s all the Christmas charity we’re allowed. Come seven days from now, he must be in court. What’s he going to do—represent himself?”

“Does he know you’re here? Because I told him to come to me if he needed anything.”

She shook her head. “You know his pride would never allow it.”

“That’s what I thought.” Ben fell quiet. “He couldn’t find
anyone
to take his case, no matter how much he offered?”

“It’s the prospect of career suicide that’s scaring off the lawyers. We’d have to keep paying them for life if they lost their jobs because of him and then couldn’t find other work. It would be like the protection racket of Cosa Nostra.”

He laughed. “You always make such apt comparisons. But what makes you think a canal builder and Harvard professor would know a lawyer greedy enough or unscrupulous enough to take on a case like this, regardless of what it would do to his reputation?”

“A man who parts mountains?” She smiled. “Who else could I possibly turn to?”

Ben nodded. He looked grateful to be asked. “I see Harry’s conundrum. What is he yelling to the man on the street, to the lady in the wheelchair at the Haymarket? If he wants someone to represent him, he must find a man who either knows nothing about him or who desperately needs the money. Preferably both.” He gave Gina the name of James Domarind. “He graduated from Boston College. Read in biological sciences, but when his mother died, he wanted nothing more to do with medicine or test tubes. So he came here to Harvard Law. He took an engineering course with me to satisfy his graduation requirement.”

“What makes you think he can help us?”

“Because he was still in his first year when he started handing out laminated business cards. I thought that spoke of his audacity. I have one here in my wallet. I was impressed.” Ben produced the card and handed it to Gina. “He works out of a tiny office on Boylston. His practice is concentrated on family law, but I figure this might fall under that.”

“Yes,” said Gina. “Trying to keep a family together.”

“Exactly.” Ben paused as if weighing his next words.

Now that Gina had a name, she wanted to say goodbye and rush off, lest someone saw her here, someone who knew Harry. But Ben wanted to tell her something.

“You know I went to see him a few weeks ago,” he said. “He was here in Cambridge, rabble-rousing. He was determined, despite the cold. And he got a pretty good crowd response.”

“Did he see you?”

Ben shook his head. “I was in the back. I wanted to say hello afterward, but . . .” He sighed. “He didn’t look ready to hear from me.”

“So what did you think?”

“Of what?”

“Of Harry. Becoming like Eugene Debs. Proselytizing on street corners.”

Ben didn’t reply at first. “Something’s happened to him,” he finally said. “He was always fascinating, and he still is. But he used to be good-humored, easygoing, calm. Now all I heard was disdain. A little boring to listen to, if I’m being frank. Even if you agree with him, all you want is for him to shut up. He speaks in such platitudes. Business is bad, profit is bad, money is bad, materialism, the hunt for wealth. It’s hard for people to support, even college students, and as you know, they will support anything. He used to be witty. Poke fun at himself.”

“Not anymore. Not in a long time.” She lowered her head. Not since they had come back to Boston.

“Well, his grimness is rather off-putting. The system’s not working, he keeps saying. Yet most of the people he says this to are working!”

“Not your Harvard crowd.” She sped up.

“Students, yes, but others? Bankers, small business owners, hotel managers, accountants, engineers. Professors. Boston is thriving, investing, rebuilding. Everyone has a new car, a cottage in the country, silver bicycles, leather sofas. We send our children to private schools. We go to the Cape for Christmas and August. We dance. The only minus for the rest of us are the liquor laws. Prohibition and Harry—two things that dampen our spirits and both for the same reason: they’re joyless.”

Gina wanted to laugh, but didn’t. She couldn’t agree—she couldn’t side with Ben, of all people, against her husband, whom she was, after all, trying to help—but she couldn’t wholeheartedly disagree either.

“Was there ever joy in the revolution?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ben said. “It’s just my observation. Advise him to lighten up, if he can. His current predicament we will fix. I guarantee Domarind will take the work. He’ll be perfect for this.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because his only scruple is himself. Beyond that, he cares not a whit for the affects of man. Harry will doubtless tell you, and doubtless has, that the seat of capitalist conscience is not in the heart but in the pocketbook.”

“Oh,” said Gina, “he’s told me.”

“Capitalism is a system that coins profit out of the misery of millions.”

“This also I’ve heard.”

“The irony will be,” said Ben, stopping Gina at the train station on Harvard Square and taking off his hat to say goodbye, “that it is this very system that will keep Harry out of jail. Because James Domarind is about to coin some profit out of your husband’s misery.”

Six

BEN WAS RIGHT. DOMARIND,
a large, ungainly man with a potbelly and thinning hair that he kept meticulously flattened in a comb-over to the right, did not ask about the revolution or dialectical materialism or the command economy. When Gina and Harry went to see him in his one-room, seedy, stale-smelling office above a fancy shoe shop on Boylston, he examined the police report assiduously. He talked about every last detail of it with Harry, while Gina sat silently trying hard not to think about what lovely finds there might be downstairs. She had glimpsed a pair of green suede buckled pumps. Maybe they had her size? Could she excuse herself, say she would be right back?

Domarind wore a suit that had been pressed a week or two earlier, and his shoes, which he clearly had
not
bought downstairs, looked distantly shined, at best. The desk was piled three feet high with papers and manila files.

The first thing Harry said to him after they had been introduced was, “Everyone is afraid, Mr. Domarind, because the Russian Revolution has sounded the death knell of the old order.”

“Perhaps that is why they’re trying so hard to throw you in jail, Mr. Barrington,” Domarind replied. “They’d like to stay alive a little longer.”

After he read the complaint against Harry and listened to the long story of Harry’s side, he asked, “Is that all? Any other incidents I should know about?”

“That’s all,” said Harry.

Domarind chewed on his pencil. He wasn’t looking at Harry or at Gina, only at the files in front of him. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “After you called a few days ago, I wanted to get better acquainted with the man I would be meeting, so I took the liberty of asking the Boston police if they had any other reports on you.” He coughed. “I was quite surprised, as you can imagine, by the, um, extensive record of your activities that I received from the police, from the DA’s office, and from the District Court—activities stretching back nearly fifteen years and to another city.”

“That’s all bygones,” said Gina, her mind off the shoes. “It’s old news.”

Domarind nodded. “Absolutely, Mrs. Barrington. That may be. Except . . .” He coughed again. Still no eye contact. “What is
not
old news is the little incident in 1923, while Mr. Barrington was on probation for a major felony under the Espionage Act, when he was accused of distributing seditionary—”

“No, that can’t be right,” Gina interrupted. “Harry’s had no violations since we returned to Boston.”

Harry said nothing.

“Harry?”

“It was just a bullshit thing!” Harry exclaimed.

Gina wobbled in her chair.

“Oh I agree,” said Domarind. “Except the terms of your probation clearly stated that you could not violate the terms of it even to litter.” He opened his hands in question. “So tell me—how did you keep yourself out of jail?”

Gina could tell Harry was reluctant to confess. “I paid off two of the cops to bury the charge,” he said at last. “I don’t remember, but they might have taken long sabbaticals to Barbados or St. Croix right at the time of my hearing, and without them, there was no case.”

“Well done.” Domarind nodded approvingly. “A tropical vacation for two, and no case. What there is, unfortunately, is a file a block long. And the prosecutor has found it. He didn’t even have to look that hard.”

“What does this mean?” asked Gina.

“What this means,” Domarind replied, “is your husband’s straightforward case for disruption of the peace has gotten a touch more complicated. Had he stayed away from trouble, the 1923 incident would be swept under the rug. But now, it’s a serious and felonious prior. You’re currently already being charged with a felony under the Espionage Act for advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government.”

“I wasn’t advocating. I was recommending.”

“After committing a felony by violating probation, you decided to recommend that a mob of civilians take up arms against the United States government? In other words, revolution?”

“Don’t worry,” Harry said. “I’ll be going easy on the revolution from now on.”

Green suede shoes forgotten forever, Gina sat swallowed up by the din of the roaring ocean. It felt as if a roof had just blown off her house. The eye wall was behind her the whole time, and she didn’t even know it.

She heard Domarind say he would do what he could. He watched Harry write a check for his retainer.

They started for home in silence. Eventually Harry spoke. “I’m delivering papers in the morning. For a little money.”

“That’s where we are? We need paper delivery money?”

“Just a little extra. For incidentals.”

“What paper? The
Globe
?”

He hemmed for a moment. “The
Daily Worker
.”

“The
Daily Worker
,” she echoed. “You’re facing felony charges of sedition, insurrection, possibly treason, and you’re selling the Communist Party rag to prove to them that they have no case against you?”

“Not a good case. I do believe that freedom of the press is still a protected right. Look, I’m asking you not to worry. Please. It’s not how it was. In the last few years the Workers Party has regrouped. We’ve moved away from advocating open overthrow. It’s a difference in emphasis. We’re now focusing on recruiting new members, not campaigning for immediate change. It’s less volatile. Everything is fine. So don’t fret so much, okay?” He kissed her. “I’m going to the library.”

She went home and cleaned the little apartment obsessively until it was time to pick up Alexander from school.

Domarind asked for one postponement after another until he got a judge he knew to be overworked and close to retirement. The lawyer cited the First Amendment and the Fourth in support of his argument that the case against his client should be dismissed. Miraculously the judge agreed. The case was dismissed. “You’re welcome,” Domarind said on the steps of the courthouse. “But Harry, you heard the venerable Judge Dockery. You must keep away from the public square. Tempers are high over this communist thing.”

“Of course. You’re right.”

Two months later Harry was arrested again, this time for inciting indirect violence in a piece he had written for the
Daily Worker
.

“I didn’t incite violence,” Harry told Domarind. He had gone alone this time.

“Did you or did you not quote Berkman and Goldman?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“Did you or did you not say that all significant change can only be brought about by force?”

“I
quoted
them!
I
didn’t say it.”

“Harry, please. It doesn’t fool even your wife, who, I see, is not by your side today.”

“She is busy with our son.”

“It won’t fool the court.”

“Get me the judge you got me last time.”

“Unfortunately Dockery’s been transferred to Boise.”

“Boise . . . as in Idaho?”

“Is there another one?”

“Is that code for something?”

“Dockery has retired, Harry, yes.”

“So find me a socialist judge!”

“Because they abound here in Boston.”

“You know they do. Max Eastman didn’t serve time for his First Amendment violations in
The Masses
. Who was
his
lawyer?”

The gauntlet was not picked up. “Was Max Eastman on probation?”

“
I’m
not on probation!”

“Of course you are. Dockery had dismissed your last case without prejudice.”

“Right. I thought that meant it couldn’t be reopened.”

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, Harry. You should’ve listened more closely. It means just the opposite. Without prejudice means they can reopen at any time if there’s another violation. Which there now is. Reopen the old one, move forward with the new one. Plus the felony probation violation, plus a mile-long record. Charges pile up and up.”

“Okay, small mistake on my part. So what do we do now?”

Domarind looked weary. “When you go to the hearing, make sure your wife is not busy with your son but is by your side. It doesn’t look good if you’re married and you go alone. It looks really bad, actually.”

“I understand.”

“Everywhere you go, take her with you. Do you understand? Whenever you utter a single word in public, make sure she is standing by your side, holding your arm, looking like an elegant Beacon Hill princess.”