Paullina Simons - Bellagrand

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.

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?”