Bellagrand

Mimoo laughed. She said a few choice words in Italian, which she didn’t translate for him even when asked. “Harry, you are a learned man,” Mimoo said, “and a well-read man, I know that. You’re always buried in some book. Our electric bill is proof of how much you read. You have many fine qualities. But there are things you are completely ignorant about, and I don’t mind telling you what some of them are.”

“Please tell me, Mimoo, what I’m ignorant about.”

“One is how fathers feel about their sons.”

As soon as she said it, all three of them, sitting on a bench outside the courtroom while court was in recess, bowed their heads. August had come and gone, and with it Harry and Gina’s chance to find out how parents felt about their own children.

“What’s the second thing, Mimoo?” said Harry, hurrying on.

“Do you know who Guilherme Medeiros Silva is?”

“I don’t believe I do.”

“That’s why,” said Mimoo, “you are ignorant.”

Harry waited. He turned to Gina. “Do you know who that is?”

Gina sighed. “Mimoo, leave him alone. What do you hope to achieve?”

“Do I want to know who it is?”

“No,” said Gina. “You don’t.”

“Guilherme Jr. was born in this country,” Mimoo said, “in a hut off Martha’s Vineyard, but he was the son of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. His father worked as a crewman on a whaling ship. He was killed when the boy was twelve.”

Harry opened his hands. “Okay.”

“That’s when Guilherme left school and went to work to support his mother and younger sisters. He took a job at the cotton mill in New Bedford. He worked very hard and was noticed by his employer. He got promoted. He learned everything about manufacturing and production and costs. When he was eighteen years old he went to Philadelphia to study stocks and bonds. After he came back he took a job at a factory, turned that factory around, saved it from bankruptcy, made it profitable. That’s when he was asked to save another mill in trouble. He not only saved it, but saved eight other nearly bankrupt mills around it. In 1899, the year your wife, her brother and I came to America, he started to build the largest textile mill in the world. The one that produces twenty percent of all the woolens and worsteds in the United States.”

“Wood Mill?” Harry said.

“Yes. He named it after himself. William Madison Wood is the American name of little Guilherme Silva, born in a shack, son of a deckhand. An immigrant like your wife. That’s your greedy capitalist whose business rebuilt this town and whose business you brought to its knees. Go picket against him.”

The jury delivered its verdict: the two Italian men were acquitted of all charges. Two weeks later, however, Harry, facing a lesser charge of felonious public disturbance, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison, commuted to two months followed by two years probation.

While Harry served out his sentence in January and February of 1913, Big Bill stopped paying his wages. “But tell him that I’m organizing another project,” Bill said to Gina when she called to collect, “even bigger than Lawrence, and as soon as he gets out, he’s right back on the payroll because I need his help. This one is at the silk factories in Paterson, New Jersey. We’re mobilizing now.”

When Gina protested the lack of wages, Bill patiently explained to her that a man could not be paid for hours he didn’t work. “That way anarchy lies,” Bill said. “And we are not anarchists, are we? Well, maybe you are. I know most women are. No, we are communists.”

A year after the Lawrence strike, the agreements Big Bill had hastily set up with Wood Mill had all but collapsed and most of the gains the women paid for with Angela’s blood and Gina’s baby’s blood had all but vanished. It took the town many years to recover from the damaging effects of the strike. Some say it never recovered. When the textile mills in the Carolinas started to make the worsteds and woolens at a fraction of the northern price, American Woolen went out of business and Lawrence with it.

Certainly Gina felt that she and Harry had never recovered.

Chapter 3 (#ulink_48e2a4f0-da08-5a67-9e7d-70d6f0cb10e0)

A SERVANT OF RELIEF (#ulink_48e2a4f0-da08-5a67-9e7d-70d6f0cb10e0)

One

TO HIDE WAS EVERYTHING. In 1905, in the immediate aftermath of her and Harry’s elopement, Gina could hardly hide from herself, but she took some comfort in being anonymous to others. She didn’t want to face the questions she couldn’t answer, not in Lawrence, nor in Boston.

Why aren’t you back in school? Why isn’t he working? Why didn’t you have a proper wedding? Where is his family? What happened to all his money? Wasn’t he about to marry someone else?

When she went to visit her old friend Verity, they barely talked about the past, Verity’s hands full and eyes myopic of the current chaotic present.

For the most part, Gina could hide from the dreadful things.

But not all dreadful things.

To get Verity out of her narrow flat on the fifth floor of a brownstone in Back Bay, Gina had persuaded her friend to leave her four children with her husband and help her with some of the Sodality tasks she volunteered for on the weekends. She took Verity with her to a hospital ward for terminally ill women at Massachusetts General, and then to the Boston Library where they sorted through boxes of donated books. They visited an ice cream shop and finally headed to Holy Lazarus on Clarendon. A soup kitchen had been recently set up in the basement, and on late Saturday afternoons, before evening Mass, Gina would feed the poor. She liked to do it before she received Communion.

When they had almost finished ladling out the grits and beans and bread, a petite blonde woman and a tall, imperious-looking woman walked in from the back stairs with the parish priest.

“Oh my God,” whispered Gina to Verity, her hands going numb. “That’s Esther. And Alice!” Frantically she glanced around for a door to escape through, a pantry to hide inside.

“Who are Esther and Alice?” Verity said in her normal voice.

“Harry’s sister and his former fiancée!”

“Oh, of course. That’s why I recognize—”

“Shh! Look down!”

Gina couldn’t follow her own advice. Father Gabriel held the blonde’s elbow deferentially, as he showed the two women the meager facilities, the few beds in the corner. He brought them to the food line. Gina thought her insides would fall out. Why did she have to wear a happy floral peasant dress, why was her hair so loosely piled atop her head, falling down, curling all over the place, why did she have to come today of all days? There was a fair by the Charles River that night, she and Verity planned to go there with the kids; still, why couldn’t she have been more tailored, ironed, polished? She lowered her head and continued serving the grits, missing the plates, making a mess, not looking up. They passed right in front of her.

And stopped.

Ah, Father Gabriel. Sweet, oblivious, well-meaning Father Gabriel. “Ladies, these two girls are Verity and Gina. They volunteer for us, help us prepare the food, serve it, clean up. Gina especially is very dedicated. She is a Sicilian immigrant and lives thirty miles away in some town near Andover—Gina, where do you live again?—but she’s here every Saturday, helping us. Isn’t that right, Gina?”

“That’s right, Father.”

“Look up, child, be polite.”

Gina couldn’t. All the blood had drained from her face into the heart that was about to fly from her chest.

“Gina speaks good English, I know she does. What’s your name now? She recently got married and changed her name to something American. I can never remember. What is it?”

Gina said nothing—as if she could speak! Even Verity next to her mishandled a serving.

The only sound came from Alice—a sharp intake of a much-needed breath.

In the crashing heart attack silence of the next few seconds, it was Esther who spoke, never forgetting her impeccable breeding that dictated you must never make a kindly priest feel uncomfortable by keeping silent when a word would do.

“Barrington,” Esther said, in her ice-cold polite contralto, perhaps foggy on some of the other tenets of her exalted education pertaining to tact. “I believe it is Barrington. Isn’t it?”

Was that last question addressed to her? Gina couldn’t tell, because she was never lifting her head again as long as she lived.

Father Gabriel laughed amiably. “No, dearest Esther, I don’t mean your last name. I mean her last name. Girls, these ladies are two of our most generous benefactors. They’re the reason the indigent men have food to eat and a bed to sleep in.”