Children of Liberty

by Paullina Simons

  “That’s a logical fallacy. They’re both false.”

  They walked inside the mobbed and noisy Memorial Hall, ordered chicken soup and pork with potatoes, paid and sat down. It took them a while to find two seats together.

  “I forgot to ask—weren’t you waiting on the Porcellian decision this week?”

  “I was, but don’t change the subject.”

  “I’m not. You don’t change the subject. What did they say?”

  “Ben,” Harry said in between hungry bites. “All other too-obvious-and-not-worth-pointing-out—again—dangers aside, your mother wants you to stop coming to her anti-canal meetings. Have you not noticed? She fears you will disrupt things.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They said no,” said Harry. “They said I’d be a better fit at one of the other final clubs.” He paused. “What? It’s fine. I don’t much care. Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know I don’t care,” Harry said. “I just don’t want him to lord another thing over my head. That’s really the only reason I wanted in. So I’d stop hearing it from him. But now it’s done.”

  Ben gave Harry a long blink of regret and sympathy and swallowed his food. “How do you know this about my mother?”

  “Know what? Oh. Two weeks ago at afternoon tea she told my father, who told my sister, who told me.”

  Ben shrugged. “Ignorance of facts heavily influences my mother’s position. The canal is an economic enterprise. It can and will square with her pacifist organization. She just doesn’t know it.”

  “Yes, because you’re the only smart one in the room.”

  “I thought you were the only smart one in the room?” Ben grinned.

  “This is indeed so.” Harry tried not to smile. “But what about Panama fighting Colombia for its independence even as we speak?”

  “So? Let them fight.”

  “Why are we siding with the Panamanians?”

  “Is that a real question? We’ve been through this. Because we’re at war with Spain over its untrammeled colonization policy in places precisely like Colombia. And second, because we can’t build a canal through Colombia. Perhaps a geography course is in order before you graduate from the most prestigious university in the United States.”

  Now Harry laughed. “Perhaps a common sense course for you! The women, led by your own mother, are going to hang you from the rafters.”

  “My mother has never been particularly fond of me. Her conformist bastion needs a dissenting voice. They can’t just have a group of yah-sayers at Old South. The Tea Party began there for God’s sake! It’s a rebel debate hall. I’m going to find an opportunity to inform them that their pacifism and my canal are not mutually exclusive.”

  “I want to be there for that one.”

  “You will be.”

  “Metaphorically speaking,” said Harry.

  “However you meant it.”

  Harry adamantly shook his head and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “No. I really can’t,” he said, standing up. “I’m carrying a full load this semester. I’ve got a Metaphysical seminar, Labor Questions in Light of Ethical Theory, Socialism and Communism with Cummins and he is very tough. He told me I’m not reading enough every night. Can you imagine?” They cleaned up their trays, shouted greeting and parting words to their classmates, and started out. “And Alice has roped me into another charity extravaganza besides. You and gangly Verity are going to have to draw in the tanned Italian fly by yourselves.”

  Ben took Harry’s arm. They had been walking through Harvard Yard, and now stopped so Ben could be more persuasive. “Harry, listen to me …”

  “I will not, and grabbing my arm is not going to persuade me.”

  “We cross the prairie as of old, the Pilgrims crossed the sea, to make the west, as they the east, the Homestead of the Free!”

  “Poetry also won’t work.”

  “Harry, not five minutes ago cows grazed in the Boston Common! Now look at our city. How do you think it got this way? Counting houses, markets, factories, your father helped build this town …”

  “Please don’t bring my father into this.”

  “Hide, leather, merchant fleet, textbooks, smell your city, Harry!”

  “Manure, trash, you’re right.”

  “No! Molasses and bananas. Coffee, newspaper print, books on the streets. All hallmarks of civilization.”

  “All somehow without a canal.”

  “But the rest of the world isn’t so lucky. With the canal, civilization will come to all.”

  “Because of the canal?”

  “Yes! They will bring us bananas; we will bring them lobsters and shoes.”

  “And this is why I have to come with you on Thursday?”

  “You have to come with me because you’re my friend.”

  “Benjamin, I am your friend, but I’m not supposed to be marrying you. Alice, bless her, demands I attend some charity ball this Thursday. I wasn’t joking about that.”

  “Charity ball or the world’s greatest fruit industry created and expanded right here in Boston?”

  Harry tried a different tack. “What about Gail from Grays? Just two months ago, she was on your arm and you were dreaming about Truro together.”

  “You’re imagining things. I walked her from Grays to Gore Hall once. She mentioned her family used to go clamming in Truro. From this you draw lifelong commitment?”

  Harry sighed. “Is that what we’re talking about here? Lifelong commitment?”

  “First things first.” Ben smiled widely.

  “Honest to all that is holy, this is the most insane I’ve seen you. Tell me,” Harry said as they quickened their step on the way to University Hall, “is it Panama or the girl?”

  Ben didn’t reply. Harry wondered if Ben himself knew the answer.

  3

  Verity Dunne had never been to Boston before she became friends with Gina. She and her two younger sisters had been born and raised by two Irish parents in Lawrence. Her father was a day laborer and her mother a textile mill worker, among other things, and they had once taken their children north to Hampton, and east to Salem, but not south. Last week had been her first train ride, her first outing. Though she was three years older than Gina and ostensibly Gina’s chaperone, she seemed substantially younger, and lacked Gina’s passion for the big city. Her excited curiosity was slightly tempered by her anxiety.

  Gina got Mimoo to agree to let her occasionally stay overnight at Verity’s because they worked late at St. Vincent’s and started their day early. Verity went to St. Mary’s School for Girls while Gina walked to Pacific Mill.

  After a few exemplary overnights, Gina and Verity gained parental trust, and Gina decided the time was right to take the 5:15 train to Boston. Gina knew what Mimoo and Salvo and Pippa didn’t know and Angela had long forgotten, which was that Verity’s mother worked two night jobs besides her day job at the mill—as an undertaker’s assistant four days a week and as a caretaker to a blind gentleman the other three. The reason she worked two more jobs was because her husband was sporadically employed at best. The reason her husband was sporadically employed was that he tended to come in late to work and get fired. And the reason he tended to come in late to work was that he was a drunk, and spent most of his nights passed out on the couch. Naturally the family kept this grubby fact of their daily life in strict confidence. Verity’s two younger sisters stayed with their grandmother in Methuen during the week, while Verity was responsible, diligent, hard-working, and largely on her own. As long as Verity came home before her mother walked in the door at 11:10 p.m., she could do as she liked. Gina knew this, and had learned to exploit it. As a result Gina was the first person to gain Verity’s trust. Verity could barely stop spilling out the details of her sad life to a sympathetic and receptive Gina. Everyone got what they wanted: Verity a sorely needed friend, and Gina a narrow passage out of the trapped existence of a fifteen-year-old Catholic Italian immigra
nt.

  Latching gladly onto Gina and allowing herself to be swayed without much persuasion, only fear sometimes spoke to Verity’s timid heart, fear of getting caught, of getting into trouble, of facing the righteous wrath of the adults—but the excitement of getting a little dolled up and going to Boston by train—by themselves—was so exhilarating that fear became nothing more than fuel on the fire of her freshly minted independence.

  The girls, of course, had no proper clothes to wear to Boston; for most of her adolescence Verity wore lumpy dresses, slightly let out, patched up with fabric as she grew, and Gina fared even worse. She had come with a trunk full of peasant clothes that she now wouldn’t be caught in a nunnery wearing. The few dollars she made working all went to the new house fund. The Attavianos, with Pippa and Angela, had just weeks earlier moved out of the crummy row house to Summer Street, right off the Common, where they had found a simple but charming folk Victorian for rent. They rented almost the entire house, upstairs and downstairs. A walkway through a small front garden, eight steps up to the deep porch, a living room and dining room combination, with a kitchen stove off to the side, three bedrooms upstairs and a coal room and washing facilities down in the basement. It was a mansion! It even had a small overgrown backyard. In the attic lived Rita, a widow. Mimoo liked her.

  So the family had more room, but also greater expenses. Every cent they earned went into the kitty to pay the rent, utilities and food. There was nothing left for Gina’s shoes, or a new hat, nothing even for material for a dress. But back in Belpasso, Gina had learned how to spin from Rafaela, the old blind herder down the road whose goats she milked and whose sheep she sheared, and she became so swift that each year she won awards as the fastest hand-spinner in town under the age of twenty. She considered it a wasted talent, until she got to Lawrence.

  She could have instantly got work on the mechanical lightning-fast spinning machines at the mills, but to sit long hours in a stifling, humid room year round for slave pay held surprisingly little appeal for Gina. Instead she offered St. Vincent’s sisters her services to card and spin the scraps of poor quality wool she brought home. The nuns found her a medium-sized, beat-up wooden spindle and distaff and a pair of carding paddles with half their teeth missing and put her in the small backroom they used for storage. In poor light, racing to keep the wool from drying out and matting, Gina teased, combed and disentangled the raw fleece, twisting it into rovings that could be drafted and spun. Compared to carding, spinning the wool into yarn took almost no time at all. Carding would’ve taken even less time had she not had to wash the fleece so thoroughly. Leaving a little of the natural sheep lanolin in the wool made it more elastic, easier to work with and had the extra benefit of keeping her hands soft. Rafaela’s hands had been like a baby’s bottom. Alas, Gina’s hands were still like sandpaper.

  After she had sold a hundred and fifty skeins of undyed yarn for a 100% profit at Saturday’s bazaar and made five dollars, the nuns took up a collection in church on Sunday and bought Gina a used, large one-thread hand- spinner that rested on the floor. She wanted a two-thread spinning wheel but that cost a hundred dollars. It would take them two years to collect that kind of money. Some of the sisters volunteered to help her card the wool, and though they weren’t very thorough, afterward Gina’s cones of yarn appeared much faster. What began as a volunteer side job developed into hours of backbreaking work. She couldn’t bring home enough free wool to spin.

  Eventually she took three of the nuns with her to Washington and met with Percy Clark, her floor manager, asking him, with full intercession from the divine sisters, if he would like to donate some of the more unusable scraps for the mission at St. Vincent’s to help the poor of Lawrence. “Everything can be used,” Percy said. “There is no such thing as unusable. Except for the breech pile, but you don’t want that.” Gina didn’t want to admit that that indeed was what they had been using. He offered Gina—but only if she sorted and washed it herself on her own time, not the company’s—ten pounds a week of head fleece, or grade four out of eight. The nuns were delighted. Gina, too. Now she could leave a little lanolin in the wool—grade four was softer, and the spun yarn was better and sold for a penny more. The money they raised went for doctor’s bills or to women with children whose husbands were infirm or unemployed or dead, or whose houses burned down—a frequent occurrence with all the open flames from candles and kerosene lamps and fireplaces.

  Gina was no fool. True, she offered her services to St. Vincent’s for free, but the one thing she asked for in return was the proceeds from one hank for every five she sold. The sisters readily agreed. Now Gina had virtually unlimited supplies of wool to work with. She became blazingly fast. As she spun the wool ever thinner—parsing a pound into sixteen skeins, then twenty-two, then, if she was supremely careful, thirty—she dreamed about the spinning machine, and how much yarn she could draft and sell once the nuns acquired one for her, and how much more money she could earn. She had plans to set up her own industry. The more delicate her yarn, the more she charged for it. She started dreaming of ways to dye it cheaply, so she could charge four pennies, six, even eight, instead of two or three like now. In the meantime, with the few dollars she eked out, Gina bought a couple of yards of moss green cotton, and some white and black lace and sewed herself a pretty day dress. One more week of non-stop work purchased her a hat to go with it and a taffeta ribbon to tie up her hair. Dio vi benedica, Rafaela. You learn something every place you look.

  When her mother saw her in the new dress, there was a scandal and she was forbidden to wear it. “Your skirt is too fitted,” said Mimoo.

  “No, Mimoo, you’re mistaken. I’ve gained weight. And there is no let in the silk. Lend me money to buy some more fabric, I’ll sew myself a looser skirt.”

  “You haven’t gained weight,” said Mimoo, who had.

  What was clearly white, Gina shook her head and called it black. “I have, I have.”

  “Aside from being too slim, it’s shamelessly short,” said Mimoo. The hem barely covered the middle part of her two-inch heel.

  “My skirt is exactly one inch off the ground,” said Gina.

  Mimoo and Angela flung open Harper’s Bazaar magazine to prove to Gina beyond any argument that all respectable women’s skirts dragged on the ground half a foot at least.

  Gina refused. She made a cogent, articulate, rational argument that fell entirely on deaf ears. First she said she was not a woman. Second, that she never wore skirts that long in Italy. Her mother pointed out, correctly, that they were no longer in Italy.

  Gina then applied the inconvenience argument. Long skirts made it impossible to go up and down stairs, to go down the street without tripping, to carry anything—to be independent. Mimoo and Angela, with Pippa joining in, pointed out that all other young girls and young women, all women in fact in Lawrence, Boston, Andover, Lowell and everywhere else in the New World somehow managed.

  She followed with the ignorance argument. “Mimoo, you and Pippa don’t know what you’re talking about. Mine is called a walking dress. Or a rainy day dress. All the ladies in Boston wear them, and they are by definition more comfortable to walk in.”

  In desperation Gina pulled out the life and death argument. Long skirts, whose hems constantly swept across the filthy ground, picked up disease from the dirt, the garbage, from the horse manure left on the streets. It was a health hazard—it could cause infections, skin conditions, blood poisoning, tuberculosis, pneumonia, typhus, diphtheria, death!

  “Oh, isn’t she just an amphitheater of tragedy!”

  “Yes, she’s a regular La Bohème!”

  “Mimoo!” yelled Gina. “They let horses decompose on the streets! You want my skirt to roll across horse remains?”

  “Don’t go where the horses decompose. And don’t yell at your mother.”

  “You want me to drag my skirts across the carcass that has been left there for days, sometimes weeks?” Gina asked, just as loudly. “You think that’s better
than keeping my hem one inch above ground?”

  “All I know,” Mimoo said loftily, “and Pippa and Angela agree with me, is no one is supposed to see your shoes when you’re a young lady. That’s how it’s done in this country. That’s how you’re going to do it. You do know, don’t you, what kind of women keep their skirts that short?”

  Gina didn’t ask and wasn’t offered more information. Railing privately against the insanity, she sewed a five-inch velvet panel into the waist of her dress with the too slim skirt now covering her shoes by three inches, and carried the heft of the dress in her hands so she could rush to the train without falling.

  4

  They got to North Station at twenty minutes to seven and had to hurry to miss the first introductions at seven o’clock. They were going to take the subway (“The first subway built in the United States was built right here in Boston”), but even Gina was uncertain as to how the subway that she kept reading about worked. You went down below ground, and there was a train there, and it took you several stops to your destination? But what if you got on a train going the wrong way? What if you had to pull a lever to stop and forgot to pull it in time, how could you get back? And there was something about riding an underground trolley that was terrifying. The girls were curious, but not that curious. The above-ground trolley cars also confounded them. Which one stopped near Old South? In the end they walked to Washington Street; they knew how to do that.

  It was still light out and warm. The color of the leaves had barely started deepening. Gina slowed down her stride, to breathe the air fragrant with life, with molasses, sausages, olives, cigarette smoke, horses, the hot metal from the trolley car rails, the leather from the briefcases men carried, rotting fruit, all of it in one breathtaking, breathless inhale of the heart. If she could live in Boston and never leave, and be carried feet first out of this magnificent sprawl, with all its congestion and chaos, she would be carried out happy. She would live even then, when she was dead!

  “Isn’t it glorious, Verity?” she exclaimed, dragging her friend down Nashua Street, holding an open map in front of them. “Isn’t it simply glorious?”