Bellagrand

“Speaking of somewhere to be, Father,” Alice said, “Esther and I must run. Mustn’t we, Esther?”

“Oh, Alice, we’re well past the time we must be running. Father, will you please excuse us?”

“Lord Jesus, have mercy!” cried Verity after the priest and the women had barely walked away.

“Shh!”

“I’m going to faint!”

“You? Verity, shh! Don’t look up, just—”

When Gina glanced up, Father Gabriel was blessing the two women by the back door.

Gina watched Alice tie her bonnet under her throat, close her light silk coat. A silk coat, how beautiful, how elegant. Not homespun rough Sicilian cotton, but cream silk. She watched the slender woman’s squared back, her proud shoulders, not a blonde strand out of place. Gina straightened up, certain that before she left, Alice would turn and fix her with a wintry stare. As Esther was doing. Gina steeled her spine, ready for it, deserving it.

But Alice didn’t. She took her umbrella, smiled at the priest, took Esther’s arm, and vanished through the doors without a single glance back.

Gina was stunned. Invisible despite her height, insignificant despite her straight stature, humbled by Alice’s mute contempt, she realized Alice’s not turning around was worse than Esther’s blatant confrontation.

She took off her apron, wiped her hands on a rag. “Excuse me, Verity, I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“Right back.” Gina ran after Alice.

What did she want, a Sicilian scene? Did she want Alice to scratch out her eyes, rend her garments, to hue and cry, to stürm und drang? She didn’t know what she wanted.

She caught up with them, running—ladies didn’t run—a block down Commonwealth, disheveled, shoes muddy, her hair out of place. Alice and Esther stopped walking and stood, arm in arm, Alice in her perfect bonnet, exquisite gloves, and maroon silk scarf that brought out the blondeness of her features. She was a pristine pool of clear water.

“Alice,” said Gina, panting. “Can I have a word?”

“Please step away from us,” said Esther, almost touching Gina with the back of her hand as if to swat her away. “We never want to speak to you.”

It was Alice who stopped Esther. “It’s all right. Excuse us for a moment, Esther. It’ll take but a minute.”

How Gina wished she were dressed better. At this moment of all moments what she would give not to be judged for her old shoes, a frayed dress two years out of fashion. What she would give for these women not to think that Harry deserved much better.

“Tell me why you do it,” Alice said.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Gina’s voice trembled. She wasn’t afraid of Alice, she was sad for Alice, and the sorrow prevented her mouth from forming the simplest words of remorse.

“Your name appears on the Sodality lists all over Boston. Why? Why do you go to hospitals I am the benefactor of, libraries to which I donate books, churches to which I give alms? What is the profit in it for you? Do you think that if you do this, I will hate you less?”

Gina shook her head, nodded her head, stupefied, shamed.

“Do you do it for some twisted sense of penance? Like if you feed the poor the food I buy them, you won’t be as contemptible in God’s eyes?”

“Maybe that,” whispered Gina inaudibly.

Alice’s voice was strong. She hardly blinked, her blue-eyed stare condemning and unafraid. “You’re wasting your time. Nothing is going to make me hate him less or hate you less. Nothing. You tell him that. Nothing you will ever do will change what you did.”

To this Gina could respond. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“He never even came to tell me he wasn’t going to marry me. The flowers were being carried into the church when I found out about you and him.”

“Please forgive us.”

Alice leaned in before she left to catch up with Esther. “You think God could ever bless a union that began in such dishonor?” She laughed. “Esther is right. Please,” she added, turning her back on Gina, “make sure we never see you again.”

That’s when Gina stopped visiting Verity, going to demonstrations, working at soup kitchens and hospitals. No more parade grounds, or parks, or dreams of boat rides in spring on the Charles.

Her beloved Boston relegated to the stuff of nightmares, she stayed in Lawrence and willed herself not to think about the past, the future, the present. Not to think about anything as she waited out the black doom of Alice’s words. She prayed Alice was wrong, she hoped Alice was wrong, she believed Alice was wrong.

Until the Bread and Roses strike.

Two

IN MID-SPRING OF 1913, Gina took a train and a bus to the Wayside in Concord to see her old friend and mentor Rose Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s youngest daughter was devoting the last half of her life to ministering after the needy and desperate, and Gina desperately needed to be ministered to. She knew Rose back from her high school days when she and other students from Notre Dame had traveled to Salem and Concord to work for Rose’s Home for the Sick as part of their Sodality service.

“Child, I’m so happy to see you,” Rose said smiling, diminutive but solid, dressed as always in a nun’s habit. “I haven’t seen you since the night many years ago that you came to introduce to me your intended betrothed. How is Harry?”

For many minutes Gina sat in the chair in the front hall and wept into Rose’s sleeve. Rose, full of compassion, said nothing. She didn’t need to. Only her palm that patted Gina’s back spoke. There, there, the palm said. There, there. “Come with me to the kitchen. I’ll make you some tea. You’ll have to walk past the beds of the terminally sick. You won’t mind, will you?”

“I lost my baby, Rose,” Gina said when they sat down at the kitchen table.

“God keep you. I’m sorry. I know it’s a terrible pain.”

Gina nodded, thinking those were just words from Rose. For what did Rose know of this pain?

Rose with her kind and round face leaned over and whispered, “I know what it is to lose a soul you love. As your husband lost his mother, I lost my beloved father at thirteen. He was too young to die.”

“Mine too, mine too. I lost my father at fifteen,” said Gina. “I miss him every day.”

“As your husband misses his mother?”

“I can’t say. He never speaks of her.”

“Still waters run deep, my child.”

Gina wiped her face, pulled herself up in her chair.

“First my father,” said Rose, “then my sister, then my mother. And then my husband. Yes, Gina, I had a husband. I lost him”—she continued—“because he couldn’t bear the grief we both shared.” She paused. “The grief of losing our four-year-old boy to the diphtheria that took him as suddenly as he had appeared in our life.”

Now it was Gina’s hand that reached out to pat Rose’s black vestments. Was that presumptuous? There, there. So she did know everything.

“I suffered as you suffer,” Rose said. “All possibilities were extinguished with Frankie’s last breath.”

“That’s exactly what I feel,” whispered Gina.