Bellagrand: A Novel (8 page)

“But what if you get convicted? What if you go to prison?”

“I’ll rot before I
ever
ask him for a single thing.”

Gina did not understand. “Mimoo is right,” she said. “What father would turn away a son in such trouble?”

“Herman Barrington, that’s who. I see, so you refuse to get me out? When is my trial?”

“In the fall. And I don’t refuse—”

“What month is it now?”

“March.”

“March! Gina!”

“What would you like me to do, Harry?” She paused. “Perhaps Big Bill can help you, lend you what you need? Surely he can help. You’re here because of him.”

“I don’t think he sees it that way.”

“Really? Big Bill is the one you trust to interpret
visual
stimuli?”

“Very good, why don’t you try your
ad hominem
tack on him. I don’t see how it could fail.”

They didn’t and couldn’t speak about the unspeakable. They quarreled about only what could be quarreled about.

Right before time was up, they stared at each other mutely, hiding behind the veil of their blank eyes and cold words.

“Why didn’t you stay under the table, like I told you?” he finally asked.

“I did. The table fell. The tent fell. I fell.”

“Why did you go there at all? I told you not to go to Essex Street.”

“Your all-seeing boss commanded me to. What choice did I have? I tried to find you. Maybe if you had listened to me and stayed away from that man . . .”

Harry stood up abruptly. “Are we done? I guess so.”

“You wouldn’t be in jail, is how I wanted to finish,” finished Gina.

“Yes, of course that’s how you wanted to finish.”

“Would you like me to call him for you? Ask him for five hundred dollars?”

“No, Gina.”

She stood up too. “I didn’t think so. I guess I’ll see you next Sunday.”

At his arraignment, Harry went before a judge and said he was not a paying member of the IWW but would join as soon as he was freed. The judge said, “Well, then, Mr. Barrington, we had better make sure you don’t go free.”

Elston Purdy, the lousy public defender assigned to Harry, though overworked and indifferent, was sharp enough to question why bail had been set so uncommonly high. It seemed unduly punitive, Purdy said to the judge. It took a while to get a straight answer. Bail was set high, the judge finally admitted, because Harry was Herman Barrington’s son. The customary low bail wasn’t the impediment to the likes of the Barringtons that it was to the ordinary folk of Lawrence, who couldn’t raise fifty dollars, much less ten times that. The public defender proceeded to successfully argue that a son should not be penalized for the inaccessible wealth of his estranged father. That fell under cruel and unusual detainment. “It’s like setting bail high because John Paul Getty is a wealthy man, Your Honor. My client and his father have not spoken to each other in seven years. He has no more right to Herman Barrington’s accounts than he does to Mr. Getty’s is what I’m trying to say.”

The judge considered the motion for two days.

Harry was released without any bail at all, on his own recognizance.

At the end of September, despite Gina’s volcanic imprecations, Harry marched in support of Joe and Arturo. “They’re being railroaded, Gina, and you know it. The charges against them are bogus. They’re now being implicated in the planting of those undetonated bombs found at Wood Mill. You know they weren’t involved in that. They’re being set up. I won’t stand for it. And you shouldn’t either. They’re our friends.”

“Angela is dead,” Gina said. “They’re not my friends.”

There were no American flags at the parade, but many red flags and banners that proclaimed the anarchist slogan,
no god no master
. Harry’s involvement was duly noted by the district attorney’s office.

A few weeks later, in October, a hundred thousand people watched and participated in the Columbus Day Parade to demonstrate Lawrence’s faith in democracy and the American way. Harry was conspicuously absent from these festivities, a fact that was also duly noted by the authorities.

Joe and Arturo remained locked up until November 1912, when their trial finally got under way, right after their old friend Eugene Debs kicked Big Bill Haywood out of the Socialist Party and received a million votes for president of the United States. “
An elective office is only one step toward a revolution
,” Debs said in his concession speech to Woodrow Wilson.

During the trial Joe and Arturo were locked in metal cages in the courtroom. With the stakes being execution, the two men had the temerity to represent themselves against the charge of murder.

Arturo protested his innocence eloquently as only a poet could. “I loved her,” he said of Angela. “I would never kill her. I would never put her in danger. She was my good and true friend. I love life, I would never risk life and my soul by committing murder. Ask my loved ones, ask my family. Out in the free world waits a fine woman whom I love and who loves me. I have parents who are praying for my release. My dear friend Joe Ettor and I, we are nothing more than foot soldiers in the mighty army we call the working class of the world.”

The prosecutor told him that he was deliberately misunderstanding the charges brought against him. He was on trial for murder, not his political beliefs.

“No! It is communism itself that is on trial,” cried Arturo in the courtroom, arguing for his very life. “It has nothing to do with that poor girl’s death. Does the district attorney really believe that the gallows can settle an idea? If the idea lives, it’s because history judges it right. Joe and I, and our friend Harry too, ask only for justice. Whatever my social views are, they are. I am an immigrant. I came to this country for freedom. Like my religion, my politics cannot be tried in this courtroom.”

Smiling Joe, in his own impassioned plea to the jury, argued not only for the morality of a general strike, but for the very overthrow of capitalism because it was intrinsically immoral. “You cannot argue with immorality as if it has a voice, a reason, you cannot argue with it as with an equal partner in a discussion between men! It will not stand. We are not guilty. We are communists! And being a communist is not yet a crime in this country, is it?”

An electrified Harry sat in the courtroom and soaked it all in. Gina was deeply unimpressed with Harry’s demeanor. Mimoo was deeply unimpressed with Arturo’s oratory. “I told you, Gia,” she said, “that man was no good. Did you hear him say he had another woman waiting for him, another woman he loved? Poor Angela! Poor girl.”

“Mimoo, is that
all
you took away from their closing arguments?” Gina tried to suppress the anger Arturo’s revelation sparked in her.

“I took away the most important part,” Mimoo said. “He never loved our sainted, beautiful, martyred child, while she ran around after him like a schoolgirl, and for what? He left the entire jury in tears after that fine and fraudulent soliloquy! But where is our Angela? St. Mary’s Cemetery, that’s where. How many times did I tell her to listen to me? I know everything.” Mimoo cried and prayed.

“It wasn’t fraudulent, Mimoo.” Harry, who didn’t usually argue with Mimoo, argued that day. “It was a sincere effort to protest their innocence.”

“They do too much protesting if you ask me,” Mimoo said. “The protesting is what got them into this mess to begin with, and our Angela killed.”

“Mimoo, you and your daughter are immigrants,” said Harry. “They were fighting for your rights, her rights. They were on your side against the greed of capitalists, who care nothing for your well-being, only for making a dollar. How can you not respect what they did?”

Mimoo laughed. She said a few choice words in Italian, which she didn’t translate for him even when asked. “Harry, you are a learned man,” Mimoo said, “and a well-read man, I know that. You’re always buried in some book. Our electric bill is proof of how much you read. You have many fine qualities. But there are things you are completely ignorant about, and I don’t mind telling you what some of them are.”

“Please tell me, Mimoo, what I’m ignorant about.”

“One is how fathers feel about their sons.”

As soon as she said it, all three of them, sitting on a bench outside the courtroom while court was in recess, bowed their heads. August had come and gone, and with it Harry and Gina’s chance to find out how parents felt about their own children.

“What’s the second thing, Mimoo?” said Harry, hurrying on.

“Do you know who Guilherme Medeiros Silva is?”

“I don’t believe I do.”

“That’s why,” said Mimoo, “you are ignorant.”

Harry waited. He turned to Gina. “Do you know who that is?”

Gina sighed. “Mimoo, leave him alone. What do you hope to achieve?”

“Do I
want
to know who it is?”

“No,” said Gina. “You don’t.”

“Guilherme Jr. was born in this country,” Mimoo said, “in a hut off Martha’s Vineyard, but he was the son of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. His father worked as a crewman on a whaling ship. He was killed when the boy was twelve.”

Harry opened his hands. “Okay.”

“That’s when Guilherme left school and went to work to support his mother and younger sisters. He took a job at the cotton mill in New Bedford. He worked very hard and was noticed by his employer. He got promoted. He learned everything about manufacturing and production and costs. When he was eighteen years old he went to Philadelphia to study stocks and bonds. After he came back he took a job at a factory, turned that factory around, saved it from bankruptcy, made it profitable. That’s when he was asked to save another mill in trouble. He not only saved it, but saved eight other nearly bankrupt mills around it. In 1899, the year your wife, her brother, and I came to America, he started to build the largest textile mill in the world. The one that produces twenty percent of all the woolens and worsteds in the United States.”

“Wood Mill?” Harry said.

“Yes. He named it after himself. William Madison Wood is the American name of little Guilherme Silva, born in a shack, son of a deckhand. An immigrant like your wife. That’s your greedy capitalist whose business rebuilt this town and whose business you brought to its knees. Go picket against him.”

The jury delivered its verdict: the two Italian men were acquitted of all charges. Two weeks later, however, Harry, facing a lesser charge of felonious public disturbance, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison, commuted to two months followed by two years’ probation.

While Harry served out his sentence in January and February of 1913, Big Bill stopped paying his wages. “But tell him that I’m organizing another project,” Bill said to Gina when she called to collect, “even bigger than Lawrence, and as soon as he gets out, he’s right back on the payroll because I need his help. This one is at the silk factories in Paterson, New Jersey. We’re mobilizing now.”

When Gina protested the lack of wages, Bill patiently explained to her that a man could not be paid for hours he didn’t work. “That way anarchy lies,” Bill said. “And we are not anarchists, are we? Well, maybe you are. I know most women are. No, we are communists.”

A year after the Lawrence strike, the agreements Big Bill had hastily set up with Wood Mill had all but collapsed and most of the gains the women paid for with Angela’s blood and Gina’s baby’s blood had all but vanished. It took the town many years to recover from the damaging effects of the strike. Some say it never recovered. When the textile mills in the Carolinas started to make the worsteds and woolens at a fraction of the northern price, American Woolen went out of business and Lawrence with it.

Certainly Gina felt that she and Harry had never recovered.

Chapter 3

A S
ERVANT OF
R
ELIEF

One

T
O HIDE WAS EVERYTHING.
In 1905, in the immediate aftermath of her and Harry’s elopement, Gina could hardly hide from herself, but she took some comfort in being anonymous to others. She didn’t want to face the questions she couldn’t answer, not in Lawrence, nor in Boston.

Why aren’t you back in school? Why isn’t he working? Why didn’t you have a proper wedding? Where is his family? What happened to all his money? Wasn’t he about to marry someone else?

When she went to visit her old friend Verity, they barely talked about the past, Verity’s hands full and eyes myopic of the current chaotic present.

For the most part, Gina could hide from the dreadful things.

But not all dreadful things.

To get Verity out of her narrow flat on the fifth floor of a brownstone in Back Bay, Gina had persuaded her friend to leave her four children with her husband and help her with some of the Sodality tasks she volunteered for on the weekends. She took Verity with her to a hospital ward for terminally ill women at Massachusetts General, and then to the Boston Library where they sorted through boxes of donated books. They visited an ice cream shop and finally headed to Holy Lazarus on Clarendon. A soup kitchen had been recently set up in the basement, and on late Saturday afternoons, before evening Mass, Gina would feed the poor. She liked to do it before she received Communion.

When they had almost finished ladling out the grits and beans and bread, a petite blond woman and a tall, imperious-looking woman walked in from the back stairs with the parish priest.

“Oh my God,” whispered Gina to Verity, her hands going numb. “That’s Esther. And
Alice
!” Frantically she glanced around for a door to escape through, a pantry to hide inside.

“Who are Esther and Alice?” Verity said in her normal voice.

“Harry’s sister and his former fiancée!”

“Oh, of course. That’s why I recognize—”

“Shh! Look down!”

Gina couldn’t follow her own advice. Father Gabriel held the blonde’s elbow deferentially, as he showed the two women the meager facilities, the few beds in the corner. He brought them to the food line. Gina thought her insides would fall out. Why did she have to wear a happy floral peasant dress, why was her hair so loosely piled atop her head, falling down, curling all over the place, why did she have to come today of all days? There was a fair by the Charles River that night, she and Verity planned to go there with the kids; still, why couldn’t she have been more tailored, ironed, polished? She lowered her head and continued serving the grits, missing the plates, making a mess, not looking up. They passed right in front of her.

And stopped.

Ah, Father Gabriel. Sweet, oblivious, well-meaning Father Gabriel. “Ladies, these two girls are Verity and Gina. They volunteer for us, help us prepare the food, serve it, clean up. Gina especially is very dedicated. She is a Sicilian immigrant and lives thirty miles away in some town near Andover—Gina, where do you live again?—but she’s here every Saturday, helping us. Isn’t that right, Gina?”

“That’s right, Father.”

“Look up, child, be polite.”

Gina couldn’t. All the blood had drained from her face into the heart that was about to fly from her chest.

“Gina speaks good English, I know she does. What’s your name now? She recently got married and changed her name to something American. I can never remember. What is it?”

Gina said nothing—as if she could speak! Even Verity next to her mishandled a serving.

The only sound came from Alice—a sharp intake of a much-needed breath.

In the crashing heart attack silence of the next few seconds, it was Esther who spoke, never forgetting her impeccable breeding that dictated you must never make a kindly priest feel uncomfortable by keeping silent when a word would do.

“Barrington,” Esther said, in her ice-cold polite contralto, perhaps foggy on some of the other tenets of her exalted education pertaining to tact. “I believe it is Barrington. Isn’t it?”

Was that last question addressed to her? Gina couldn’t tell, because she was never lifting her head again as long as she lived.

Father Gabriel laughed amiably. “No, dearest Esther, I don’t mean
your
last name. I mean
her
last name. Girls, these ladies are two of our most generous benefactors. They’re the reason the indigent men have food to eat and a bed to sleep in.”

“Speaking of somewhere to be, Father,” Alice said, “Esther and I must run. Mustn’t we, Esther?”

“Oh, Alice, we’re well past the time we must be running. Father, will you please excuse us?”

“Lord Jesus, have mercy!” cried Verity after the priest and the women had barely walked away.

“Shh!”

“I’m going to faint!”

“
You
? Verity, shh! Don’t look up, just—”

When Gina glanced up, Father Gabriel was blessing the two women by the back door.

Gina watched Alice tie her bonnet under her throat, close her light silk coat. A silk coat, how beautiful, how elegant. Not homespun rough Sicilian cotton, but cream silk. She watched the slender woman’s squared back, her proud shoulders, not a blond strand out of place. Gina straightened up, certain that before she left, Alice would turn and fix her with a wintry stare. As Esther was doing. Gina steeled her spine, ready for it, deserving it.

But Alice didn’t. She took her umbrella, smiled at the priest, took Esther’s arm, and vanished through the doors without a single glance back.

Gina was stunned. Invisible despite her height, insignificant despite her straight stature, humbled by Alice’s mute contempt, she realized Alice’s not turning around was worse than Esther’s blatant confrontation.

She took off her apron, wiped her hands on a rag. “Excuse me, Verity, I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“Right back.” Gina ran after Alice.

What did she want, a Sicilian scene? Did she want Alice to scratch out her eyes, rend her garments, to hue and cry, to
stürm und drang
? She didn’t know what she wanted.

She caught up with them, running—ladies didn’t run—a block down Commonwealth, disheveled, shoes muddy, her hair out of place. Alice and Esther stopped walking and stood, arm in arm, Alice in her perfect bonnet, exquisite gloves, and maroon silk scarf that brought out the blondness of her features. She was a pristine pool of clear water.

“Alice,” said Gina, panting. “Can I have a word?”

“Please step away from us,” said Esther, almost touching Gina with the back of her hand as if to swat her away. “We never want to speak to you.”

It was Alice who stopped Esther. “It’s all right. Excuse us for a moment, Esther. It’ll take but a minute.”

How Gina wished she were dressed better. At this moment of all moments what she would give not to be judged for her old shoes, a frayed dress two years out of fashion. What she would give for these women not to think that Harry deserved much better.

“Tell me why you do it,” Alice said.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Gina’s voice trembled. She wasn’t afraid of Alice, she was sad for Alice, and the sorrow prevented her mouth from forming the simplest words of remorse.

“Your name appears on the Sodality lists all over Boston. Why? Why do you go to hospitals I am the benefactor of, libraries to which I donate books, churches to which I give alms? What is the profit in it for you? Do you think that if you do this, I will hate you less?”

Gina shook her head, nodded her head, stupefied, shamed.

“Do you do it for some twisted sense of penance? Like if you feed the poor the food I buy them, you won’t be as contemptible in God’s eyes?”

“Maybe that,” whispered Gina inaudibly.

Alice’s voice was strong. She hardly blinked, her blue-eyed stare condemning and unafraid. “You’re wasting your time. Nothing is going to make me hate him less or hate you less. Nothing. You tell him that. Nothing you will ever do will change what you did.”

To this Gina could respond. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“He never even came to tell me he wasn’t going to marry me. The flowers were being carried into the church when I found out about you and him.”

“Please forgive us.”

Alice leaned in before she left to catch up with Esther. “You think God could ever bless a union that began in such dishonor?” She laughed. “Esther is right. Please,” she added, turning her back on Gina, “make sure we never see you again.”

That’s when Gina stopped visiting Verity, going to demonstrations, working at soup kitchens and hospitals. No more parade grounds, or parks, or dreams of boat rides in spring on the Charles.

Her beloved Boston relegated to the stuff of nightmares, she stayed in Lawrence and willed herself not to think about the past, the future, the present. Not to think about anything as she waited out the black doom of Alice’s words. She prayed Alice was wrong, she hoped Alice was wrong, she believed Alice was wrong.

Until the Bread and Roses strike.

Two

IN MID-SPRING OF 1913,
Gina took a train and a bus to the Wayside in Concord to see her old friend and mentor Rose Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s youngest daughter was devoting the last half of her life to ministering after the needy and desperate, and Gina desperately needed to be ministered to. She knew Rose back from her high school days when she and other students from Notre Dame had traveled to Salem and Concord to work for Rose’s Home for the Sick as part of their Sodality service.

“Child, I’m so happy to see you,” Rose said smiling, diminutive but solid, dressed as always in a nun’s habit. “I haven’t seen you since the night many years ago that you came to introduce to me your intended betrothed. How is Harry?”

For many minutes Gina sat in the chair in the front hall and wept into Rose’s sleeve. Rose, full of compassion, said nothing. She didn’t need to. Only her palm that patted Gina’s back spoke. There, there, the palm said. There, there. “Come with me to the kitchen. I’ll make you some tea. You’ll have to walk past the beds of the terminally sick. You won’t mind, will you?”

“I lost my baby, Rose,” Gina said when they sat down at the kitchen table.

“God keep you. I’m sorry. I know it’s a terrible pain.”

Gina nodded, thinking those were just words from Rose. For what did Rose know of this pain?

Rose with her kind and round face leaned over and whispered, “I know what it is to lose a soul you love. As your husband lost his mother, I lost my beloved father at thirteen. He was too young to die.”

“Mine too, mine too. I lost my father at fifteen,” said Gina. “I miss him every day.”

“As your husband misses his mother?”

“I can’t say. He never speaks of her.”

“Still waters run deep, my child.”

Gina wiped her face, pulled herself up in her chair.

“First my father,” said Rose, “then my sister, then my mother. And then my husband. Yes, Gina, I had a husband. I lost him”—she continued—“because he couldn’t bear the grief we both shared.” She paused. “The grief of losing our four-year-old boy to the diphtheria that took him as suddenly as he had appeared in our life.”

Now it was Gina’s hand that reached out to pat Rose’s black vestments. Was that presumptuous? There, there. So she did know everything.

“I suffered as you suffer,” Rose said. “All possibilities were extinguished with Frankie’s last breath.”

“That’s exactly what I feel,” whispered Gina.

“Except you’re still young, you can have another baby, with the blessing of the Lord. I was nearly forty. I couldn’t. My poor George, he was just bent in half by it. He took to drink to drown himself, and soon the drink obliged.” Tears came to Rose’s eyes and she made a clucking sound, crossing herself with a shudder. “Whatever you do, my girl, keep yourself away from the liquid sorrows. They have a way of swallowing up everything, like the highest tides.”

“Don’t worry about me on that score,” Gina said. “I don’t have a taste for it.” They sat. “Rose, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I came because I don’t know how to help myself anymore. Or my husband.”

“That’s how I was, too,” Rose said. “But then I opened a home for dying, cast-out women. I got busy with other people’s suffering. Sometimes, during the day, it helps me forget.”

“Yes,” Gina said. “You think that’s what I should do? Open a home for the dying?”

Rose chuckled. “No. But tell me, how is Harry? He must also be struggling terribly through the loss of your baby.”

Gina clenched her fists, unclenched them, folded them into a prayer.

“We never speak of it.” She lifted her hand to stop Rose from repeating herself. “There’s been . . . I don’t know how to put it . . . a divvying up of blame.”

“He blames you?”

“I think he might.”

“Do you blame him?”

She didn’t want to lie to a nun. “I don’t
not
blame him.” It was like the sacrament of reconciliation coming here to talk to Rose.

Rose shook her head. “That’s a slow poison. Like rot.”

Gina hung her head. “I know. I tried to move past it.” Her mouth twisted, got tight. “But he hasn’t made it easy for me. He was just in jail for the problems during the Bread and Roses strike. Have you heard about that?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t. Sorrows are so abundant here, I have no time to read the papers.”

“I understand. Well, I thought when he was released we’d begin our life again, try again maybe . . . but as soon as he was released, he packed his bags and left.”

“Left you?”

“Not left me, but . . .” She didn’t know what to say, how to put it. “He asked me to go with him. He’s at another strike at the moment, in Paterson, New Jersey.”

“New Jersey?”

“The man who pays his salary organized that one, too.” Gina sighed. “Harry says we need the money. And we do. But I can’t leave my mother, my job. I’m lucky to have a job. So now he sends me his money, but hasn’t been home in weeks.” Her lips trembled. She didn’t want to tell Rose what Alice had said long ago that had tattooed fear into her heart because it sounded too much like the unwanted truth. Was it wrong to build a house like marriage, even a mansion like their marriage, on the ashes of someone else’s devastated heart?