Bellagrand

“Except you’re still young, you can have another baby, with the blessing of the Lord. I was nearly forty. I couldn’t. My poor George, he was just bent in half by it. He took to drink to drown himself, and soon the drink obliged.” Tears came to Rose’s eyes and she made a clucking sound, crossing herself with a shudder. “Whatever you do, my girl, keep yourself away from the liquid sorrows. They have a way of swallowing up everything, like the highest tides.”

“Don’t worry about me on that score,” Gina said. “I don’t have a taste for it.” They sat. “Rose, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I came because I don’t know how to help myself anymore. Or my husband.”

“That’s how I was, too,” Rose said. “But then I opened a home for dying, cast-out women. I got busy with other people’s suffering. Sometimes, during the day, it helps me forget.”

“Yes,” Gina said. “You think that’s what I should do? Open a home for the dying?”

Rose chuckled. “No. But tell me, how is Harry? He must also be struggling terribly through the loss of your baby.”

Gina clenched her fists, unclenched them, folded them into a prayer.

“We never speak of it.” She lifted her hand to stop Rose from repeating herself. “There’s been … I don’t know how to put it … a divvying up of blame.”

“He blames you?”

“I think he might.”

“Do you blame him?”

She didn’t want to lie to a nun. “I don’t not blame him.” It was like the sacrament of reconciliation coming here to talk to Rose.

Rose shook her head. “That’s a slow poison. Like rot.”

Gina hung her head. “I know. I tried to move past it.” Her mouth twisted, got tight. “But he hasn’t made it easy for me. He was just in jail for the problems during the Bread and Roses strike. Have you heard about that?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t. Sorrows are so abundant here, I have no time to read the papers.”

“I understand. Well, I thought when he was released we’d begin our life again, try again maybe … but as soon as he was released, he packed his bags and left.”

“Left you?”

“Not left me, but …” She didn’t know what to say, how to put it. “He asked me to go with him. He’s at another strike at the moment, in Paterson, New Jersey.”

“New Jersey?”

“The man who pays his salary organized that one, too.” Gina sighed. “Harry says we need the money. And we do. But I can’t leave my mother, my job. I’m lucky to have a job. So now he sends me his money, but hasn’t been home in weeks.” Her lips trembled. She didn’t want to tell Rose what Alice had said long ago that had tattooed fear into her heart because it sounded too much like the unwanted truth. Was it wrong to build a house like marriage, even a mansion like their marriage, on the ashes of someone else’s devastated heart?

The money trickled in with the mail. Instead of being in the thick of her bed, Harry was once again in the thick of trouble. And the silk strike in Paterson was violent and unending and destined for failure. No. It was Big Bill and his radicalism that was responsible for the gradual dissolution of her marriage.

Rose watched her conflicted face. “If you have the time, on Saturdays or Sundays, why don’t you come and help me here? I can’t pay you, as you know. We never pay, but we could definitely use a pair of good hands. I can feed you. You can sleep at the Wayside if you need a place to stay.”

“What about my mother?”

“Don’t you have a brother?”

“Yes, but …”

“A boy also can be a good child to his mother. Ask your brother to be a good son while you help me.”

Gina took off her coat. “No use in fretting,” she said. “How about I help you now?”

Three

“THINGS ARE STILL QUITE SPARTAN,” Rose said to Gina as she took her around the ward, a long annex attached to the Wayside, and showed her where they kept the salves, the bandages, the sponges, the bedpans. “Please stay away if you become with child again. Just in case. Sometimes we have lepers staying with us. They are highly infectious. There is bacteria in the air from all sorts of sickness. If you’re blessed enough to fall pregnant, don’t breathe in the air of the dying. Promise me?”

“The danger of that while the strike continues,” said Gina, “is slim. But how do you not get sick?”

Smiling, Rose raised her eyes and palms to the ceiling. “The God of all comfort comforts us in our tribulation so that we may give comfort to those who are in any trouble.” Rose put her arm through Gina’s. “You are a good girl, and you’re going to be just fine.” She leaned in for a confidence. “You know, I had no nursing experience before I started caring for the incurably sick. Oh, yes. Don’t be so surprised. But like my dear father, I have always been fascinated by medicine. He wanted to be a doctor before he became a writer, did you know that? Not a lot of people do. What do you think? Did he make the right choice in his life’s path?”

“Hard to say no to that, isn’t it, Rose? His books bless the future generations.”

“I suppose they do. But look, please don’t tell anyone else that I have no nursing training. They’ll close me down for sure. Come with me—I hear Alice.”

Gina blanched.

“Not that Alice,” Rose said gently. “My Alice. She must be back from her walkabout. She goes around Concord twice a week, in the afternoons. Visits the sick in their homes.” The nun paused. “Though I must say, I’m surprised the other Alice is still so top of mind for you.”

“What can I say?” Gina nodded. “She left me with a few parting words I haven’t been able to shake from my heart. Her valedictory salvo, so to speak. When things aren’t going well, her words are all I can think about.”

“Clearly what catches seed is the grain of truth, no matter how small.”

“Not even that small.” Gina pointed to the door. “Let’s go say hello.”

In the front hall they were greeted by a plump serious woman. “Gina,” Rose said, “you remember my friend and colleague Alice Huber, don’t you?”

Nodding, Gina shook Alice’s hand.

“Alice used to be a portrait painter,” Rose told Gina with a proud smile.

“I’ll tell my own story, Rose, dearest.” Alice took Gina’s other arm. Flanked by the petite sisters, the towering Gina walked through the ward between the beds of the dying. “It’s true I used to be a portrait painter,” Alice concurred. “But my heart wasn’t in it. I was looking for something else. I said that when I found a work of perfect charity, I would join it. And so I did.”

“It’s not for everyone, Alice,” Rose said. “Don’t judge people.” She looked up at Gina. “My friend can be too critical sometimes, God love her. I tell her all the time—people are the keepers of their own souls, not you.”

“And do I listen, Rose?”

“Hardly ever.”

“Exactly. Do you know, Gina,” Alice continued, “that before we built this small annex, we housed the sick right in Rose’s Wayside?”

“And it wasn’t even my Wayside anymore.” Rose laughed. “Imagine how my dear Harriet felt about it.” The Wayside was the only home Nathaniel Hawthorne had ever owned. In 1879, many years after his death, Rose and George bought the beloved house to keep it in the family. Financial hardship forced them to sell it just four years later to George’s publisher and his wife, Harriet Stone, also known as Margaret Sidney, the writer of children’s books.

“We bathed them and changed their dressings right in the parlor room.”

Rose nodded. “In the summers we used the front porch for their beds. My father used to sit and have his morning tea on that porch.”

“And in New York we collected the sick into three cold-water flats on the Lower East Side,” said Alice. “We managed. They managed.”

“Well, yes,” Rose said. “Because our goal wasn’t convenience. It was to do something to comfort other hearts than ours. To take the lowest rank of human beings—both in poverty and in suffering—and put them in such a condition that if our Lord knocked on our door, we would not be ashamed to let Him in.”