Bellagrand

Ben shook his head.

“While you were building and opening the engineering wonder of the modern world,” said Gina, “some man named Franz Ferdinand was murdered in Bosnia and because of a random death half a world away, my husband is once again in prison.”

She didn’t speak again until they were back in Lawrence.

They got home around nine. No one was in. Saturday nights Mimoo went to vespers and played bingo. Salvo was out God knows where. He told his sister he served beer in a saloon on Friday and Saturday nights. Gina and Mimoo never saw a penny of that money.

Ben sat down at Gina’s formerly revolutionary table while she put together some potatoes with cold mustard chicken and opened a bottle of red wine. They sat down together and broke bread.

“This is very good,” he said, eating hungrily. “But you don’t make Italian food anymore? Your brother was such a good cook.”

“After what happened to his restaurants, no, we don’t make Italian food like we used to. No one wants to cook it, no one wants to eat it.”

“You know, Gina,” Ben said, “years ago when I learned that Harry helped Salvo, everybody thought I was upset because of you, but really I was just jealous because I thought he’d be having Italian food every night.”

Flushing at Ben’s casual admission that once there was a time when he might have been upset over her, Gina tried to respond in kind—lightly. “Well, Harry did have it every night,” she said lowering her eyes. “Now he has it sporadically.”

“That’s a real shame,” said Ben. “So where’s your brother?”

“During the week he works at Purity in the North End. On the weekends he’s back home. We see him much more now that Harry’s away. Mimoo is happy. It’s quite a predicament. On the one hand, my husband is in prison, on the other hand, my brother is home.”

Ben finished eating. “So what happened?” he asked quietly, wiping his mouth on a napkin. “I thought the restaurants were doing so well.” He poured Gina more wine.

“Esther didn’t tell you?”

“Esther doesn’t know what happened. She just knows they were sold. Tell me. We have time. When is Mimoo coming home?”

“Eleven. And she’ll be delighted to find you here.”

Ben smiled. “Just like old times.”

They sat at the table as Gina poured out her life to Ben, all the Salvo, Harry and Angela miseries of it.

Five

AFTER THE ELOPEMENT SALVO invites Harry, who’s “between jobs” to come work at the family’s two restaurants. Harry says, “Doing what? I can’t make pizza.”

They laugh. “Of course you can’t.” Because he isn’t Italian.

Harry mopes for days, and only when Gina presses him does he reveal to her the contents of the letter he recently received from Herman Barrington calling in the mortgage on Salvo’s two restaurants. Salvo has been slow in making the payments, and after what has transpired, Herman has no interest in remaining flexible. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you what a vindictive, cruel son of a bitch my father is. I know I should have said something sooner. Please don’t be upset with me. I tried to make it right. I even went to see him.” Harry can’t look at Gina’s dumbstruck face. “Do you know how hard that was? I went to him for help, to ask him to reconsider, to give Salvo a little more time to pay, and he wouldn’t let me in, wouldn’t come out to speak to me! Sent his lackey instead.”

Herman’s letter about duties, responsibilities, betrayal, wrath, finalities, hangs from Gina’s hands.

Salvo reluctantly agrees to the solution Harry proposes and meets with Ervin Cassidy, the manager of the local First National Bank of Lawrence. After much back and forth, the bank manager offers Salvo a painful compromise: a payoff to Herman’s bank to settle the loans, and then a new mortgage. But the price of that transaction will be one of the restaurants.

Salvo has no choice but to agree.

The bank sells off the less profitable one, the upscale Alessandro’s, and leaves Salvo with a hefty mortgage for the bustling Antonio’s by the railroad. He makes lots of pizza to please the crowds and hopes in a few years to perhaps turn a profit.

Harry doesn’t have a choice after that. The Attavianos need his help if they’re going to make it. Harry goes to work with Salvo in his one remaining restaurant.

That’s the good news.

The bad news: Harry goes to work with Salvo in his one remaining restaurant.

It isn’t that Harry is a slow learner. It’s that he can’t find a role for himself in the many-spoked wheel that is the smooth operation of a family business. He tries ordering supplies, but gets bored. He tries maintaining the equipment. Tedium. Writing advertising copy isn’t for him—too facile. Neither is placing ads in the local newspaper (too pushy) or coming up with ideas to draw more people in (really too pushy). He isn’t adept at running the weekly management meetings and has no idea how to solve the many petty but constant problems that crop up in a workplace with twenty-two employees and seventy-seven suppliers. He certainly doesn’t want to learn how to cook. Counting money at the end of the night makes him ornery. Walking to the bank, making deposits, paying the bills, calling in accounts—all grate on him.

A tense year passes. And another.

One fateful day in 1908, Angela comes to Salvo in confusion. She says she ran into the bank manager walking his dog on the Common, and the man told her that despite a dozen notices there has not been a mortgage payment in over three months and Antonio’s is five minutes away from going into default.

Salvo and Gina go to the bank to clear up the mistake because they know, know, that Harry has been making deposits and telling Salvo everything is running like warm milk from morning cows. It’s an oversight. It must be.

But apparently, as the meticulous bank records show, the flowing warm milk doesn’t entail paying the mortgage.

The truth turns out to be worse than Salvo and Gina fear. How often does that happen? They are in the back office combing over the books, with Harry once again conveniently not around, when Margaret, their seating hostess, comes in to inform them she has been underpaid for the previous week. She patiently explains that for the past six months, Harry has been doubling her salary, until last week, with no explanation, he went back to paying her the woefully inadequate original wage.

“The problem is, you see, we got quite used to the new salary and thought it was for keeps,” Margaret says. “My husband and I moved to a larger home, we went to Ohio to visit his mother, took a few weeks for ourselves, and now with Christmas coming up … I’m sorry but we just can’t afford a cut in pay.”

Gina and Salvo sit like blackened statues. As she sits now in her dimly lit parlor room across from a stunned Ben as she recounts it. She doesn’t want to recount it. She wishes there were music instead. She wishes she could forget, talk about something else, never speak of it again, never think of it again, like the Bread and Roses strike, like Angela. Why does it all keep coming back up like disagreeable food?

“Margaret,” Gina says in an even voice, keeping her squeezing hand on Salvo, who is the master of raised voices, “you didn’t get a cut in pay. You got an unauthorized and unapproved bonus, and the reason it stopped is because there is no extra money.”

An unhappy Margaret, too broke to quit, says before walking out, “You’re going to have a mutiny on your hands. Because all of us who are not family have been getting extra money. And it’s Christmas for everybody, not just me. What are you going to do, not pay your staff extra on Christmas?”

Gina and Salvo sit, pods of salt.

“Don’t say a word, Salvo,” says Gina when Margaret leaves.

“I’m going to kill him.”

“I told you not to say a word.”

“One way or another he better make this right, or I swear on our mother …”

“Salvo!”

Gina, afraid for both men she loves, runs out looking for Harry. She finds him on a bench in the back of City Hall, handsome, absent-minded, detached yet affectionate, wrapped in a huge overcoat, serenely eating his lunch in the cold, immersed in his reading.

With the book still open, as if he doesn’t want her to bother him too much during his daily break, he tells her that, yes, he has been feeling bad for the people who work for them because they are having so much trouble making ends meet and they never have any extra for birthdays, a wedding, a vacation, a new house. One woman’s mother is sick and the doctor’s bills are large, one man’s boat has sprung a leak and the baker’s uncle died and the funeral expenses were a quarter of his annual salary. The dishwasher is having an unexpected third baby …

Harry tells Gina all this and then leans back against the bench, glancing down into his tome as if there is no need for further discussion. They needed extra so he gave them extra, that’s all there is to it.

“Harry,” Gina asks quietly, “you paid them out of what money?”

“Out of the money we make every night.”

“But that’s our operating money.”