Bellagrand

They don’t have pumpkins in Italy. Gina’s never had a pumpkin or made a pie out of it. She smiles. “Sure, mio amore,” she says. “Anything you want. Next time I come I’ll bring you pumpkin pie.”

“Bring one for Roy, too,” he tells her. “The other week when you brought biscotti, he raved to everyone how good they were. And he let me keep my light on an hour past curfew because he knows I like to read in bed.”

“Okay, tesoro. I’ll bring one for Roy, too. He’s a nice man. He likes me.”

“A little too much if you ask me.”

She wants to touch him to reassure him, hold his hand, press his head to hers. Other things.

“Do you know,” Harry says, “when I was, I don’t know, eleven, twelve maybe, my father took my sister and me to a pumpkin farm, and we brought these great big pumpkins home and carved them.”

“Why would you do this?”

“Carve pumpkins? I don’t know. The inside of the pumpkin is what you make the pie with. It’s messy, though. You’d like it.” He inhales. “It’s messy, just like your tomatoes.”

They can barely speak after that or look at each other. Short of breath, he can’t go on with his story. Somehow he does.

“After we removed the flesh from inside and carved the pumpkins, Esther decided she wanted to give me a fright, play a practical joke on me. So she cut one pumpkin in half, and placed it on top of our huge black tomcat sleeping on the grass, covering him as if he were in a clamshell and leaving him holes for eyes. We were sitting in our backyard that night, and through the eyeholes, the tomcat sees a squirrel and takes off like a horse, with the pumpkin still on top of him.” He laughs as he recalls it. “It was dark, and I wasn’t expecting it, everything had been so quiet, and this giant pumpkin just up and gallops across the yard, a pumpkin running after a squirrel. I must have screamed for five minutes, it was so startling and unexpected.”

Gina laughs.

Harry leans back. “I don’t think I ever heard my sister and my father laugh harder. My father actually cried. I had never seen that. Before or since. And then he kissed my sister and said, ‘You’ve outdone yourself, Esther. Well played.’” Harry shrugged. “Since he never praised her for anything, she nearly cried herself. We kept trying to do it again, stage a prank that would make him laugh. But …” he trails off. “You know.”

Gina leans closer to the partition, her heart opening, squeezing shut.

“You said you were only eleven or twelve?”

“Yes.”

“So your mother was still alive? Where was she?”

Harry looks down at the table, then up at the hands of the clock above Gina’s head. “I don’t know where she was,” he says, his eyes opaque. “Not with us.”

When it is time to go, she stands with the books to be returned in one hand.

“Lean forward,” he says. She obeys. Harry glances behind her at Roy, reaches out and strokes her cheek, her hair, cups her face. Gina presses his fingers against her lips as they pass over her mouth.

“I’ll see you next Sunday, il mio delitto.”

“I’ll see you next Sunday, my wife.”

Chapter 4 (#ulink_7f4efcb9-1f7a-50d9-b07f-65b9b61d458f)

THE LOVE OF AN AMERICAN GIRL (#ulink_7f4efcb9-1f7a-50d9-b07f-65b9b61d458f)

One

“I ADORE THIS HOUSE,” Rose was saying to Gina about the Wayside. “Sometimes I half-wish it were still mine, still in my family. I told everyone we sold it because we couldn’t stand living in it after my son died, but the truth is, George couldn’t keep up with the mortgage payments, no matter how hard he worked. We had to sell it.”

Gina listened half-attentively, one spiritual part of her listening, one mechanical part washing the floor, and one female part lamenting the sorry state of her dress.

The last part was the loudest of all.

“Did he”—she thought hard to recall Rose’s words—“work hard?” Her question less to do with Rose than with her own self, her own life.

“Yes. He was a professor, he corrected other people’s manuscripts on the side, he edited books, he wrote columns. He was a genius, and he never stopped working. But it just wasn’t enough for this summer home and a place in Boston.” Rose sighed and crossed herself. “It’s better this way. I chose this—not just to serve the poor, but to be of the poor. And I’m still here in my beloved Wayside, where I can sleep and yet continue to do the work of the Lord.” Rose gazed at Gina, scrutinized her. “In my past life when I thought I also could be a writer, like my father, I penned a story called ‘The Love of an American Girl.’ Have you heard of it?”

With her bare hands Gina was wringing the mop of all debris, filth, waste, medicines. “I haven’t heard of it, no.”

Rose followed her outside while Gina changed the water in the bucket. “Not many people have. I’m not my father, I soon learned. I don’t have his gifts. In any case, in my story, the heroine is dazzling and full of virtue. But the crux of any story is to know when one is loved.” Rose paused. Waited. When there was no response from Gina, she nudged further. “Don’t you agree?”

“I don’t know,” Gina said, full of hesitation. “What if one thinks one is loved, but one is not?”

“I think what often happens,” Rose said, “is one is loved differently from the way one expects, and it’s this false judgment and subsequent disillusion that leads to so much trouble in life. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Gina didn’t answer. What Rose was saying didn’t apply either to her physical activity or to her spiritual distance. She was rushing to finish mopping because she wanted desperately to change her dress before she had to cook and serve lunch and Ben came.

At 11 a.m. every day the bell rang five times in the tiny makeshift chapel to commemorate the five wounds of the Lord, followed by an hour of silence, during which Gina washed and cleaned and prepared food for the sick. Psalms were recited before and after meals, starting with Psalm 1, ending with Psalm 150, repeating every three days.

Have mercy on me, o God, and hide thy face from my sins.

“Gina, you know how I feel about you,” Rose was saying. “You are like a divine child. But you also know how I feel about the work we do. It’s uncompromising. And I’m unyielding when it comes to maintaining a very high level of servitude. The sicker our patients, the poorer and more wretched, the more I expect from the women who minister to them.”

“I know that, Rose.”

“I cannot force anyone to be good, it is not my inclination nor my desire. But any hint of laziness, frivolity or self-indulgence and I must ask them to seek service elsewhere.”

Gina tried hard not to bow her head. “I understand.”

Rose kissed her. “Do you remember you once told me you were too fond of dancing and ice cream to be a nun?”

“I don’t remember saying that.” It did sound like her, though.

Rose smiled. “Do you still feel that way?”

Gina frowned, slightly puzzled. “I’m married, Rose. I can hardly become a nun now.”

“Are you too fond of dancing and ice cream to be a wife?”

Letting go of Rose’s hands, Gina stepped away. She tried not to stagger away. “No. But I must run, I have much to do.”

“This may surprise you to hear, Gina, but I myself am not a merciful woman.” Rose crossed herself. “What I do is bountifully preach mercy.” She paused. “And by mercy I don’t mean forgiveness. I mean care for life’s poorest of the poor and its most abandoned.”

He drew me out of deep waters, he brought me out into a spacious place, he rescued me because he delighted in me according to the cleanness of my hands in his sight.

Rose’s patients were the poorest of the poor, life’s most abandoned. At death’s door, they required nothing more than compassion and kindness. They were kept clean to the best of the nuns’ abilities. Rose insisted that whatever one may have felt about the state of the sick, the only face one was allowed to show them was one of mercy and goodness, because that was what the dying required. But sometimes even the priests who came to administer last rites or to offer Communion would turn their heads and vomit before they continued to walk between the beds, so overpowering were the physical conditions that surrounded the sick.

For many months Gina had immersed herself in the works of God, as an offering, as repentance, praying for Harry to be released early, for a baby to bless their life, for a bit more money, to struggle less, to want less, to be happier. But something happened to her after Ben returned to her life. Whereas before, all she had noted about herself was her inner life, she was now made unduly conscious of the outer Gina. The woman who sewed her own clothes, who had once saved money for silk and chiffon, for lace gloves, for patent leather shoes, for bobbles and beads, gave herself a withering once-over and concluded that no woman who worked in a ward of humans that made priests retch and men faint could make herself outwardly attractive to anyone. Holiness was wonderful but did nothing for vanity. Holiness was beautiful but not externally.