Bellagrand

“How do you propose I do this?” She squeezed her hands together.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t want to be in jail. I can’t stay in jail.”

“Harry, please can you call your father?”

His gray eyes froze over. He blinked in judgment. “No.” He stood up.

“Harry, please. He can help you. He will help you.”

“I went to him once, when he called in the money he had lent to your brother. Do you remember how he treated me?”

“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 underway, 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?”