“Most couples have jealous fights after a night of drinking,” Harry said late one evening as they were climbing, panting, up steep Charles Street and Gina was goading him to bicker with her. “Not us.”
“I’m not fighting, Harry. I’m striving for understanding.”
“Are you? What’s not to understand? I’m not interested in the things they talk about. I have no opinion.”
“But, darling, tonight Edward, instead of his usual savannah harangues, brought up the recent Scopes trial and William Jennings Bryan. You love this subject.”
“Hardly love. It piqued my interest for five minutes when Scopes was first arrested.”
“You were thinking of reading a seminar on it. And yet you said nothing.”
“Tonight I had nothing to say about it. Bryan and Darrow went at it in court, like the mortal enemies that they were. It’s what we were all expecting. Bryan gave it his all and died of a brain hemorrhage five days later. Darrow’s fine oratorical skills weren’t enough. Scopes was convicted in a kangaroo court despite them. Fined one hundred dollars. What’s to discuss?”
“You could’ve said all that.”
“What’s the point? They think Darrow is a hero.”
“I thought you liked persuading those who disagree with you to come around to your opinion?”
“I no longer care what anyone thinks or believes.”
That was it. There was a supercilious whiff to his dismissal of friendly conversation with others. It was as if he deemed them to be little more than ants arguing.
“Last week Meredith brought up the Teapot Dome scandal,” Gina said, “and I know how fond you are of discussing bribery and conspiracy in high places at oil companies.”
“Not last week,” said Harry, “and not with a woman. What am I going to do? Argue with a woman in her own home at a dinner she had her kindly cook prepare for me? That is not what I do, Gina.”
“I understand. But Barnaby, who so wants to be your friend, was desperately trying to drag you into a discussion about Chrysler’s new fifteen-hundred-dollar car, which you said you might want, and the reduced working hours at U.S. Steel, and you—”
“And I refused to be dragged in?” Harry nodded. “I’m not interested. I’m studying unrelated things at Tufts. My dissertation is on Thermopylae.”
“I know.” She paused. She had something to say about that, too. “That’s not unrelated. It’s metaphorically significant.”
“Only to you. I’m interested in the actual history.”
“How is that going by the way?” It seemed as if he had spent years on the dissertation, and it still wasn’t done.
“It’s coming along.” He shrugged it off. “Admittedly slowly. I’m trying to get it right. The subject is complex. Did I tell you the amazing thing the Greek king Leonidas said to Xerxes at the hot gates to the pass when the Persian demanded the surrender of Sparta’s weapons?”
“You told me,” Gina said. “Leonidas said, Come and take them.”
“Isn’t that incredible?”
“You know what’s incredible?” She was irritated and out of breath. “That a man who spent twenty years of his life advocating and demonstrating against military action of any kind, even going to prison for his beliefs, Wilson’s whitest dove if you will, would write his doctoral paper on the bloodiest, most brutal battle of them all.”
“I am interested in many things, Gina,” Harry said. There was that loftiness again. “Why does that surprise you?”
“Yes, many things. Not Clarence Darrow, or Chrysler, or even Theodore Dreiser.”
“Other things.”
Was it her imagination or had Harry become disengaged from their daily life? He was studying so much at home and at the Athenaeum, reading, writing, muttering under his breath, driving to and from Tufts, busy, busy, busy with everything but her. The scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion.
Who said that? Was it that wisecracker Oscar Wilde again?
They stopped speaking as they climbed their way to Mt. Vernon.
Yes, Boston is a marvelous town. Everything a town should have, Boston has in abundance. It’s a walking town, which means it’s intimate, despite being large. It’s technologically advanced. It’s aesthetically beautiful. It sits on a mighty ocean and perches on the banks of a winding, not too wide river. It has universities and libraries and parks. It has shopping and nightlife, restaurants and opera. It is populated with beautiful, bountiful people, people who are sensible and polite, well dressed and well mannered.
There is no other city Gina would rather live in. And she lives in the most beautiful part of Boston, perched on a hill overlooking a park and the city skyline. The salty smells of the nearby ocean fly in on the wings of breezes. What could be better? She dresses elegantly, like a lady, and everyone sees it. Her son is stunning, and everyone sees that, and admires her for having a boy such as he. What a successful mother, what an accomplished woman she must be to have a tall, handsome, well-behaved boy. Alexander’s greatness is Gina’s reflected glory.
Her husband is bookish, scholarly, erudite, and amiable (mostly), studying (and studying and studying) to be a doctor of letters, so he can become that most respected of things, a professor. After all those years of toiling for pennies, she doesn’t have to work. What a blessing. She joins a reading club, a parents’ club, a park conservatory committee. She becomes a charter member of the Daughters of Boston, fundraising for all the right causes. She volunteers at the Boston Library on Copley Square. She buys a sewing machine and makes dresses and skirts, which she donates to the local branch of St. Vincent’s. She volunteers at St. Vincent’s. As before, in Lawrence, working at St. Vincent’s eventually starts to overwhelm the hours of her day, because there is so much to be done. But she manages. She takes Alexander with her everywhere. They are rarely apart, except when he is at school or when Harry plays soccer with him at the park.
Alexander hasn’t suffered as she had feared. He has blossomed. He loves his weekends with his aunty; he has made friends in Barrington—a boy named Teddy, a girl named Belinda. Esther jokes that she has trouble calling him in for tea because the three of them are always out in the yard, in the woods, by the creek. Esther’s laughing face sometimes clouds at that point, as if she wants to add like Harry and Ben to that sentence, but of course doesn’t, and Harry is long gone anyway, in another room.
Gina reads and cooks and shops and cleans. When Alexander is old enough to attend kindergarten, she busies herself until the hours have passed and it’s time to go get him. When he starts grade school at Park Street Kids on Brimmer Street, she walks him there each morning, hand in hand, and then busies herself until it is time to pick him up again. She dedicates herself to the full-time tasks of household maintenance and child-rearing, to being a good and loving wife. If someone asked her to describe herself, Gina, without pause, would say, I am Jane Barrington, and I am Alexander’s mother.
But she is also Harry’s wife.
The Russian civil war over, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics named, Lenin dead of cerebral hemorrhage, The Great Gatsby all the rage.
Alexander four, five, six, rifles out of sticks, frogs as bombs, cannons not soccer balls. Everything he holds in his hands he makes into a weapon.
1923, 1924, 1925. Like seconds, the years tick tock by.
Why would Isadora Duncan’s words come back to haunt her at the oddest times? Why would Gina remember that peculiar woman, a sensualist who lost her children to a tragedy, who danced with abandon through Boston on her last tour of the United States, who married Sergei Esenin, a Russian poet eighteen years her junior, who left her and then hanged himself? “Life is not real here!”
Goodbye my friend, goodbye, Esenin wrote in his own blood before he died. There is nothing new in dying, but living also is no newer.
Life is not real here.
Chapter 16
BATTERY WAGNER
One
A
LEXANDER, DID I EVER tell you the story of a man named Samuel Sebastiani?”
“No. Tell me now.”
They were ambling through the Public Garden. It was summer, 1926. Gina took his hand. Alexander let her. At seven he was still young enough not to be embarrassed by his mother. She wore a wide white hat with a purple silk ribbon. He wore a light skimmer cap, which made his hair appear almost black. They made quite a picture shimmering together down the floral paths. Maybe they would have time to get some ice cream before she had to be back to start dinner.
“Samuel was born in Italy.”
“Just like you.”
“Yes. But in Tuscany.”
“That’s not like you.”
“Right. In Tuscany his family grew grapes, and made wine. He came to America when he was eighteen. He was penniless.”
“That’s not like you either. You were fourteen.”
“Right. Samuel went to San Francisco.”
“That’s not like . . .”
“Alexander.” Gina put an affectionate hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You don’t have to point out every difference between my story and Samuel’s. It’s not a game of spot the difference. It’s a listening game.”
“Oh! How do you play?”
“I talk, you listen.”
“Oh.”
“Now then. Where was I?”
“He was penniless in San Francisco.”
“Precisely. He worked for three years in a quarry in Sonoma, cutting up cobblestones.”
Alexander raised his hand.
“You don’t have to raise your hand, mio figlio. What is it?”
“What’s a quarry?”
Gina fought the impulse to cover him with kisses in public. “It’s a big dusty pit in the ground which is mined for rocks and stones.”
“Oh.”
Like the granite quarry your father and I meandered to, alone for five minutes, me in a sheer pink froth, like bubblegum, him in a suit, our whole life in front of us, feeling happier than we had the right to feel, wanting nothing more than to be together. Quarry also means prey. I hope that doesn’t apply here, to me and your dad.
“In 1896,” she continued, after the barest of pauses, “Samuel bought a wagon with four horses, loaded up this wagon with cobblestones, and carted them to San Francisco, where he began supplying the city with much needed building material. A few years went by. He made money. Lots of money. He made enough money to buy the quarry.”
“He must have been rich.”
She nodded. “He saved his pennies. He did well. The stones from his quarry were used to build the city hall in Sonoma.”
“What’s city hall?”
She pointed far across the sloping expanse of the Boston Common to the shining gold dome on top of Beacon Hill. “That’s our city hall. A big government building. In which your father and I got married, by the way. Not important. By 1904, Samuel had saved enough to buy some land to grow grapes. And he bought and bought, and grew and grew, just like his family did in Tuscany. He made the grapes into wine. He built the Sonoma Valley, which is where the wine industry was born in the United States.”
Alexander was quiet. Gina waited. “Well?”
“You and Dad got married in a government building?”
“Madre di Dio! That’s all you have to say?”
“What is wine?”
“Something adults can’t drink anymore. It’s a delicious adult beverage.”
“Why can’t you drink it?”
Gina smiled. “Too much of it makes you silly in the head. Our government decided it didn’t want us to get silly in the head. So they outlawed wine.”
“What’s outlaw wine?”
Gina laughed.
“Mom . . .” Alexander furrowed his brow. “What does it have to do with me?”
“Every story has something to do with you, son.”
“You keep saying that. But how does this one?”
“Well, think about it, and you tell me.”
He thought about it. “I never want to get married, yuck, but if I ever did, I want to get married in a church, like Aunty Esther.”
Gina shook her exasperated head. “No, cuore mio. Samuel is the kind of man I want you to be. If the good Lord gives you five stones, make ten from them. If he gives you fifty, make a hundred. He gives you one? You make two. Work like Samuel. Turn your stones into wine, Alexander. Do you understand?”
“You want me to dig for stones?”
“No . . .”
“Drive a wagon?”
“No.”
“Make horses into wine?”
“No—” The sun was going straight to her head. “Why must you be so literal?”
“What’s literal?”
Both Gina and Alexander stopped speaking. Across Charles Street on the Boston Common, they heard a distant booming voice. They waited for the cars to pass. They crossed the road. There was a crowd assembled on the grass.
But the voice! It sounded troublingly familiar. A needle went into Gina’s heart. They stepped closer, Gina holding Alexander tightly by the hand. “Don’t be afraid, son,” she said. “They’re a little boisterous.”
“I’m not afraid,” he said calmly.
She pushed on, standing on tiptoe, trying to see the speaker.
“It sounds like Dad, doesn’t it, Mom?”
Gina gripped Alexander’s hand.
“Mom, let go. Ouch.”
“Sorry.”
The voice was so intense! But that’s not how Harry spoke. He was measured, thoughtful, evenly calibrated. It was rare for Gina to hear his unmodulated voice. Yet here it was, and in public. She paid no attention to the content as she pushed through the crowd, muttering to the old men and young women, pardon me, excuse me, dragging Alexander behind her.
The crowd was lapping up the speaker’s words. All around her they hooted and clapped. Some booed, shouted things, but everyone was engaged, fired up.
Finally, Gina and Alexander stepped forward into the open area in front of the speaker. It can’t be him, she thought, paling, her entire Beacon Hill world fading, washing away in the highest tide, just like that, before her eyes.
“Long LIVE the proletariat as it goes forth to renew the WHOLE world! Long LIVE the working men and women of all lands! By the strength of their HANDS they built up the WEALTH of nations! They now LABOR to create new LIFE! Long LIVE Socialism, the religion of the FUTURE! Greetings to the fighters, to the WORKERS of all lands! Have faith in the victory of TRUTH, the victory of JUSTICE! Long LIVE humanity, fraternally united in the great ideals of equality and freedom!”
“Look, it’s Dad,” said Alexander.
Two
HARRY GLANCED AT THEM standing below the crudely made construction, a wooden crate, his boxy pulpit. He barely paused to acknowledge them. A blink for her, a blink for the boy, his attention redirected to the crowd.
“What’s Dad yelling about?” Alexander asked Gina.
“I don’t know, son.” An icy numbness flooded her. She shivered, still clutching the child’s hand. “I’m not sure it’s Dad.”
“Dad!” Alexander waved.
Harry waved back.
Alexander turned his face to his mother. “It’s Dad.”
Gina pushed her way out of the crowd and on shaking legs hurried home with Alexander. Her mind was empty of thought. Her heart was empty of feeling. It was as if she had been anesthetized, body and soul.
Alexander got busy reading and trying to start a fire by rubbing together two rocks he had brought home. Gina got busy making ravioli with pesto sauce.
The front door opened, closed.
Harry stood in the kitchen.
She thought her voice might fail her, like her body, paralyzed. But no.
“How was your day at Tufts, dear?” she asked. “Your dissertation going well? Almost done?”
He said nothing.
She said nothing.
“Don’t be upset.”
“You don’t thi
nk I should be upset?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m asking you not to be.”
“I shouldn’t be?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“There’s a lot you’re not saying, Harry. Reticent as a mute. What’s the matter? Gave it your all on top of the apple crate?”
“Remember what I told you about Oscar Wilde and women with a sense of humor?”
She wiped her hands on a dishrag. “Do I seem to you as if I’m remotely joking?”
“Don’t be upset.”
“Oh. Okay, then. I won’t be. That was simple, wasn’t it?”
They ate dinner, the three of them, as always.
“Dad, why were you shouting this afternoon?”
“I wasn’t shouting, son. I was passionately speaking about things I believe in.”
Alexander swallowed his ravioli. “Sounded like shouting to me.”
“Maybe next time you can come with me. Hold my notes, my pens, my bag of pamphlets.”
“When? Because I’m going to Aunty Esther’s on Friday.”
Gina sprang up. “Tesoro, if you’re done eating, go to your room and finish your reading or making your fire. Please.”
“I’m not done eating.”
“I hear talking but not a lot of eating,” said Gina. She didn’t sit down. She could barely hold her tongue.
Finally, after the water torture of artificial civility, they were alone downstairs.
“What are you doing, Harry?” They were in the drawing room with the door shut, standing far apart, the length of the couch between them. Gina didn’t know where to look. She couldn’t look at her husband.
“What I’ve always done.”
She could barely get the words out. “I thought you were done persuading other people. Isn’t that what you told me?”
“I’ve finished with trying to persuade the bourgeoisie we live amongst,” he said. “I’m not interested in winning over their hearts and minds. I’m with your Emma on this. What others consider success, the acquisition of wealth, power, social status, I consider the most dismal of failures.”
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