Bellagrand
She wasn’t a child anymore. The child labor laws no longer applied to her.
Many things no longer applied to her.
For a time Gina had worked at Duck Mill, making cloth out of specialty cotton called canvas that was also used to make sails. Tonight on the train it came back to her. Making a sail. For a boat on the ocean. Having the wind take her away. In any direction. She dreamed about the sails as she spun the cotton. She worked blazing fast, as always, but dreamed languidly of warm water and boats and the wind grabbing hold of her with the sail up. Well, why not? Harry was such a dreamer. It’s one of the things she loved most about him. Why shouldn’t she allow herself a dream or two? What, only the young and the (formerly) wealthy were allowed to dream?
Things hadn’t quite turned out as she thought they might, planned they would, dreamed they could. It was cold on the train. Like in their house. She closed the coat tighter around herself, breathed into her woolen scarf, curved into a ball.
For one, she truly had believed in her Italian, family-centered heart that after a few months Harry would make amends with his family.
They had spent the summer after they were married at her mother’s house in Lawrence while they figured things out. She continued to work with Salvo in his restaurants. A few nights a week she helped out at St. Vincent de Paul’s mending their donations. She had intended to return to Simmons College in the fall to finish her degree. She expected to move to Cambridge when Harry started teaching at Harvard again and to commute to classes from there.
It took him until the morning she was rushing off to register for her fall semester to show her the letter from the head of the economics department terminating Harry’s relationship with Harvard University.
He said he didn’t have all the answers. She hoped he had some. He had been reading so much, out on the porch in a rocking chair, his nose always buried inside one thick educational tome or another. Surely he could have read a morsel that would solve just one of their problems. But he couldn’t solve her senior year in Simmons.
“What do you propose we do?” he had said. “Live apart? I live here with your mother, brother, cousin, while you live on campus close to Archer?” Archer was a boy who had liked Gina.
She suggested they both move to Boston.
“What would we live on? Your bookstore salary?”
Gina didn’t know what to say. She cocked her head this way, that, looked out on to Summer Street, chewed her lip. “You could, oh, get a job.”
“Doing what?”
Gina wanted to point out the sewing machine, the looms, St. Vincent’s, St. Mary’s, Salvo’s restaurants, the houses Mimoo cleaned, the quarries, the lumber yards, the printing presses, the textile mills. She wanted to gently remind Harry of his black contempt for indolent Dyson, a boy proud of his desire to work only five hours a day. She wanted to tell him that Canney’s, the basket-weaving factory, was hiring. She didn’t say any of these things. Because you couldn’t say them to a descendant of one of the Founding Fathers, an aristocrat. “How are we going to live?”
He shrugged and she saw in his face that he didn’t have a plan. “I’ll figure it out. This is new for me, uncharted. Give me time.”
She stood in front of him in her smart coat and hat, her walkabout shoes. She had her green purse in her hands, that’s how close she had been to going to the train station to catch the 9:45 to Boston to register for senior fall. Slowly she put down her purse and untied the ribbons of her hat.
That was six years ago.
“I was going to become even more politically active on campus,” Gina told him when she still told him things. “I was going to form a club to advocate for women’s suffrage. Perhaps other rights too. Advocate for women to be allowed to attend Harvard University one day. Maybe even teach there.”
“Women teach at Harvard?” Harry laughed. “What are you saying? That’s not a right, that’s folly.”
“I wanted to get my masters.”
“I wanted things too,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “They’re sitting in front of you in a skirt and blouse.”
“Indeed.” The verbal conversation ended and another conversation, less verbal but no less intense began.
“I’ve already worked in Salvo’s restaurant, Harry,” she said, picking up the topic of work a few days, weeks, years later. “I kept books, hired and fired, hosted. Washed dishes. Made pizza. I did all that.”
“So now you want me to take a job even you don’t want?”
“You want to continue living with my mother?”
“You know I don’t,” Harry said quietly, in the little bedroom they shared, with her Shaker nightstand and dresser, her narrow wooden bed. “You’re too quiet in your mother’s house. As if you’re afraid she’ll hear us.”
“I am afraid she’ll hear us.”
After they had tried hard to make sure Mimoo didn’t hear them, Gina tried again. “We both want it, we have to find our own place, darling.”
“Well, we can’t find our own place,” Harry said, “without money.”
She hung her head. “Not money,” she said. “Work. We can’t find it without work.”
He stared at her blankly. “That’s what I said.”
“No. You said …”
“What’s the difference?”
“Without work,” Gina said, “there is no money.”
“Oh the miseries of constantly toiling for a subsistence!” he exclaimed. “How does one ever have a moment to discover his path in the forest if one is always scrounging a penny or two for his next meal?”
“Immigrants don’t have the luxury of paths in forests,” Gina said. “They’re too busy working.”
“But I’m not an immigrant.”
She didn’t want to remind him he was also without luxuries.
The train ride was too long.
She would prefer not to be cold.
She would prefer not to have to work so long, so hard, so late that when she fell into bed she was too tired for dreams, for nightmares, for love.
Though in some ways raw exhaustion was preferable to having time to sit and think when the trains were stalled and the miseries multiplied.
Blessedly the train began moving. She would try again tonight. Everything had changed. He had to know that.
Three
GINA DIDN’T GET BACK to Lawrence until after nine and walked with her eyes averted past the establishment that used to be her brother’s dream, where the crowds used to mob him for lunch because he made the most delicious pizza in town. She kept her eyes to the ground and rushed the mile across Haverhill, past the Common, to Summer Street, a mile back to Mimoo’s small folk Victorian home they had been renting since 1899.
Braced for questions about her late arrival, she climbed the porch stairs and opened the door. Harry was sitting at the kitchen table with his back to her, papers and maps in front of him, huddled over them with Angela, Joe and Arturo. He turned his head to her, smiled absent-mindedly, distant intimacy in his eyes, and turned back to the table. Indeed there were loud words, but they weren’t for her. The four of them were animatedly discussing something problematic. But they always animatedly discussed something problematic.
“What is more important?” Arturo asked. “Freedom or equality?”
“Why can’t we have both?” said Harry. “Why do we have to choose? I don’t want to choose. And I want the people of Lawrence to have both. I want them to be free, to live in harmony, to be selfless and happy, and I want them to have economic, material equality. Not one or the other. First Lawrence, then everywhere. Right, Gia?” Harry wore a flannel shirt untucked and had a four-day growth on his face, there since Friday. His sandy hair was long, almost long enough to tie back. No one had hair like that, she kept telling him. That’s why I like it, he told her. There is no one like me. His clear gray eyes were as lovely as ever, his voice strong, calm, droll.
She bent to kiss his cheek. “Right, tesoro.”
Lightly he leaned his head into hers. “You’re home late. Have you eaten?”
“I’m not hungry. Salvo was working and Phyllis didn’t get the baby until after seven.”
“Did you talk to Salvo, Gia?” Angela asked. “About Christmas?”
Gina hung up her coat and hat, put down her small purse. She took off her shoes, put on her slippers. She went to the cast-iron stove and lit the kettle. Then she spoke. “I did talk to him,” she said. “Anyone for a cup of tea?”
But they were buried in the labor laws of Massachusetts. No one replied. She made one for Mimoo, and when it was steeped and sugared, she walked past the round table at which the radical knights sat, plotting and planning, and headed upstairs to her mother’s bedroom.
“Arturo says he’ll come for Christmas,” said Angela, her hand over his.
“I’ll come too,” Joe said. “If I’m invited.”
“Of course, Joe,” said Harry. “The more the merrier. Gina, you’re all right with Joe coming for Christmas dinner?”
“If he brings the turkey, why not?”
“Is your wife joking?” she heard Joe say. “Where am I going to get a turkey?”
“She’s joking,” said Harry. “She fancies herself as a bit of a comedienne.”
Mimoo was lying on the bed, still in her street clothes. She was salt and pepper gray now, heavier than when she had first come to America, but no quieter.
“About time you came to see your mother after being gone all day. How is he?”
“Why don’t you get under the covers, Mimoo?” Gina said, setting the cup of tea by the bedside.
“I’ll get under the covers when I’m good and ready. What did he say?”
“Who? Joe?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. What do I care what that fool has to say about anything? What did my son say?”
Gina sighed.
Mimoo turned away.
They sat for a few moments while downstairs boisterous voices planned unrest and street action.
“Help me get ready for bed,” Mimoo said. “I’m tired.”
Gina helped her mother up. “Don’t worry,” she said. “1912 will be better.”
“You sure about that?”
“I am.”
Mimoo laughed. “Do you not hear what’s going on in your very own kitchen? What are they conspiring about? Mark my words, it will be the worst year yet.”
“What are they always conspiring about? Strikes. Demonstrations. Petitions for better wages. It’s all talk, don’t worry.” She squeezed her mother’s hand. “I only know what I know. It’ll be a good year. You’ll see.”
“You know what would make next year a better year? If my son and that no-good husband of yours made amends, put the past behind them, sat down at the same table.”
“I’m working on that.” Gina unhooked Mimoo’s dress and underskirts, took off her stockings. She slipped the nightgown over her head and brought her a basin filled with water. When her mother was in bed, Gina laid Salvo’s money on the nightstand beside the cup of tea.
“He thinks money is going to make up for it?” Mimoo said. “Tell him I don’t want his money.”
“We tried that,” Gina said. “He didn’t speak to us for a year. He had a baby and didn’t tell us.”
“The way your brother gets around, how do you know he had just the one?”
“Mimoo!” Gina covered up her mother and kissed her.
Mimoo took her daughter’s hand, looked her over, touched her pale face, pushed the strands of her dark curls behind her ears.
“I’m good,” Gina whispered. “Don’t worry. Just tired.”
“What else is new? Did you hear? Your friend Verity is with child again.”
“Dio mio, no. How do you know this?”
“I play bingo with her mother every Saturday. She told me. What is that, her sixth baby now?”
“Fifth, Mimoo. Stop it.” Gina rubbed her eyes. “How does she do it?”
“Clearly you haven’t taught Verity your foolproof methods of family planning,” Mimoo said. “Someone should tell her that human beings in many ways are like vegetables: quality and not quantity is what counts.”
Gina smiled, leaning down again to kiss her mother. “I learned that well,” she said. “No one can accuse me of disastrous overbreeding.”
“Mia figlia, no one can accuse you of any breeding at all.”
The smile gone from her face, Gina stepped away to the door.
“Tell them to keep it down,” Mimoo said, clutching her rosary beads. “Some of us have to get up in the morning.”
Four
HARRY WAS TRYING TO sleep, but she wasn’t having any of it.
“Don’t give me this tired business,” she whispered. “You weren’t too tired for revolutionary blather.”
He put his hand over her mouth. “It was just blather. I’m exhausted.” He kissed her. “Tomorrow we’ll talk. As long as it’s not your usual Christmas sermon.”
“Which is …”
He mimicked her. “Harry, when oh when are you going to make amends with your family?”
“What a good question.”
“I’m sleeping. I can’t hear a word you’re saying. I’m dreaming you’re quiet.”
She shook him.
He groaned.
“Shh,” she said. “Or Mimoo will think we’re up to no good.”
“If only,” said Harry, his fingers pressing into her.
“First we talk, then we’ll see about other things.” They were conjoined under the covers of their small bed. It was cold. They pressed against each other to stay warm.
“I won’t be awake for the other things.”
But something was signaling to Gina that he might be.
“Why aren’t you nicer to Arturo?” Harry murmured into her neck. “Angela feels deeply wronged that you and Mimoo aren’t more friendly to him.”
“I’m friendly.” But it was true her mother was intractable when it came to Arturo. As if she saw black ravens above his head.
“American polite. Not Italian friendly.”
“I’m trying to be more American and less Italian in all my ways.”
His hands were over her body, under her nightgown, his mouth finding her mouth. “Please don’t. Anything but that. Be Italian, I beg you.”
“Italian then in all ways,” she murmured back. “Not just in this one way you love.”
“I’ll take the baby with the bathwater.” The blankets came off slightly as he clung to her, his mouth on her bare shoulders, the nightgown pulled away. She squirmed away from his mouth, she was hypersensitive, and what to say about that? Nothing really, except …
“Speaking of babies … um, listen … I wouldn’t mind a little baby, Harry.”
“What?”
“You mentioned babies.”
“I didn’t mention babies. I mentioned a metaphor.”
“I was thinking of an actual baby.”
“Since when?”
She didn’t want to confess that for a long time she had been counting out her days, crossing them off her womb’s relentless calendar. “For a little while now.”
“I thought we agreed no. We both said no.”
“We did agree this,” she said into the pillow.
He had been lying on top of her back. Now he climbed off. “Well, then.”
“Well, then nothing. I changed my mind. That’s the prerogative of being a woman.”
Harry sat up. He was perplexed in expression and body. Gina had to suppress an affectionate laugh. “How can that be?” he asked. “Every other week you’re distributing illicit pamphlets about some reproductive freedom thing or other. Just this morning I saw in your bag an article from Lucifer the Lightbearer.”
“Okay …” she drew out an answer. “Reproductive freedom also means having a baby, does it not?”
“Not according to your pamphlets. Have you read them?”
She didn’t want to admit she had stopped reading them. “I don’t know what to tell you. I want a baby.”
“So sudden?”
“We’re married six years. That seems sudden to you?”
“It doesn’t seem un-sudden,” Harry said. “Besides, you expressly told me no babies. Remember Chicago?”
“Yes, I remember Chicago. Our few brief days of rainy honeymoon bliss.” The only honeymoon they’d had, she wanted to add, but didn’t. “I was twenty! You can’t imagine that at twenty and still in college I would not want a child?”
“I thought it spoke to a larger state of your independent character.”
“It spoke to me being twenty and in college.”
“And going to hear Emma Goldman sermonize every week? Did you not hear her say babies are slavery?”
“Like I pay attention. She also says God is slavery. And marriage is slavery. And work is slavery. We must choose carefully what to agree with.”
“Oh goodness, but is the bloom off the rose!” Harry half-feigned shock. “Quite frightening. Is this what’s ahead for me, too?”
“No, I’m still fond of you. Do you want me to show you how fond?”
“Kill me if I ever say no.”
He took from her some sweet, not so quiet love, and afterward in the dark, in bed, held her close, caressed her face, her body, and softly whispered to her, as confounded as before. “I simply don’t understand your precipitous change of heart.”
“Yes, it’s like falling off a cliff,” she whispered, tired herself, relaxed, sated, happy, and yet still needing to say what had to be said.
“Are you being facetious again? I can’t tell with you.”
“Me? Never.” She half-listened, gently rubbing the arm that embraced her. “But Harry, in our current circumstance, Mother Jones may be right. You can’t have a baby. Only me. That’s the law of the prophets. I can’t do what I do now and take care of a baby.”
Mary Harris Jones, or Mother Jones, was one of the co-founders of the Industrial Workers of the World and a tireless labor union organizer. She was also detested by most of the prominent women of the day for being vehemently opposed to abortion and women’s rights. She told everyone who would listen that the main reason for juvenile delinquency was mothers working outside the home. This endeared her to no one.
“I suppose I could take care of it,” Harry said, in the tone of someone who might say, I guess I can try making ice cream.
“I don’t want you to take care of it. I want to have a baby because I want to be a mother. I don’t want to be called a mother. I want to be a mother. I want to mother a child. I want that to be the work of my life.”
With an everlasting sigh, he kissed her lips, kissed her between her swollen breasts, kissed her head, closed his eyes, breathed deeply. “Tell you what,” he said. “How about we cross that bridge when we get to it?”
He settled in for sleep. Gina was quiet, lying in his arms, barely breathing, listening for the rhythmic rising and falling of his heart.
“Harry,” she whispered at last. “Amore mio, I think we’re about to cross that bridge.”
Lightly he laughed, squeezing her. “Why don’t we give our coupling a few weeks to seed, sugarplum.”
She raised her head from his chest, looked up at him in the dark. “Crossing that bridge now, mio marito.”
Finally he understood.
For a long while didn’t speak, his back to her. She stroked him. He didn’t move away.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I am telling you. This is what I’m doing right now.”
He put on his overshirt and slumped on his side of the bed. “Gina, what are we going to do?”
“We’ll be fine. Isn’t that what you always say about everything? We’ll be fine.”
“You’re not worried?”
“Are you worried?” She ran her fingernails down his back tapping and scraping her fingers over him to rile him. “Caro, you’re not ready to move out of my mother’s house, you’re not ready to get a job, you’re not ready for a baby. Before me you weren’t ready to be married. You’re thirty-four years old. It’s time. Time to take your one life by its unformed horns. You aren’t going to get another chance to swim in this river again.”
“I thought you were happy with us, with the way things are.”
She didn’t want to pause, but couldn’t help an ever so slight hesitation. “I’m not unhappy. But I wouldn’t mind not living with my mother. I wouldn’t mind a little privacy with you, just you and me and our baby. I wouldn’t mind not having to work two jobs, be away from you all these hours during the day.”
“One of us would still have to be away,” he said. “If I was working.”
She nodded in quiet non-judgmental agreement. “Ti amo. But I would like for that person to now be you.”
“Gina … we agreed.”
“Okay. We agreed.”
“And then you went to hear one feminist after another talk about free love, birth control, women behaving like men, and so on.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“And what? I got tired of it.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“You got tired of it so long ago, you haven’t come with me for years. Which is why I’ve had to keep dragging Angela with me to all those meetings. Which is why she met Arturo. Which is why my mother blames me for Angela’s current predicament.”
“What predicament? Love?”
“Something like that.”
“My point is,” he said, “we never talked about having babies. We only talked about not having babies.”
Gina sighed. “When was the last time we talked about not having a baby?”
She saw by his silence he couldn’t remember. And he usually remembered everything.
“In any case,” she continued, “what would you like me to do about it?”
“Nothing, clearly.”
“All right then.”
“Where are we going to live? We’re still at your mother’s house.”
“I can’t make enough, that’s true,” she said. “I’m not a man. But you are. And you can.”
“Did you do this to force me to get some menial job?”
“No, Harry,” said Gina. “I just want a baby. I wish you still had your father’s bank accounts to fall back on. I know things were easier for you when you could just buy what you wanted and send on the bill to your father’s accountant. I won’t object if you decide to get in touch with him.”
“You know that will never happen. Not after what he did, what he said.”
“You can tell them about their grandchild. Esther—”
“Never.”
“Your sister might be happy to hear from you, no?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care.”
“Babies smooth over a lot of things.”
“Not this.”
“Mimoo says …”
“I don’t care. Baby, no baby, my father, my sister are gone from my life. Just like they wanted.”
She fell back on the bed. “Why are you pushing them away, caro? Your family, my brother. Your friend Ben. You used to be so close. Why have you not written to him? You don’t even know if he’s still in Panama.”
“If I don’t know where he is, how can I write to him?”
“I bet your sister knows. You could ask her.”
“Stop it.”
“His mother must know. You could get in touch with her. You got along with his mother so well.”
“Yes, but she gets along too well with my father. I’m not going to reach out to her, Gia. Besides, I don’t think Ben wants to hear from me anyway.”
“You can’t be on the outs with everyone, Harry.”
“Salvo hates me so much he won’t step foot in his own mother’s house. How is this my fault?”
Gina said nothing, biting her lip, forcing herself to say nothing. Why did she have to be a Sicilian? They always blurted out every damn fool thing on their minds.
“Do you know what Mimoo says?”
He fell back on the bed too. His hand went over her belly. He spun toward her, bent over her, kissed her. “No. Tell me what Mimoo says.”
“She says the baby brings his own food.”