Bellagrand

Yet Ben came. He came like the professed, the novices, and the postulants. He came wearing his most dispensable clothing, calling himself Gina’s orderly. Sometimes he drove up to Concord so early on Saturday morning, he got to the Wayside even before Gina. He was always full of good cheer and happy stories of Panamanian feasts and fevers. He worked side by side with her among the oppressed, carrying her pails of dirty water, searching for potatoes in the earth, taking her to a market in Lexington so she could buy vegetables and bread for dinner. He never fainted and he never retched. When one day she asked him how he did it, how he stopped himself from reacting to what even the men of the cloth could not ignore, he said he had seen things in Panama, lived through things in Panama that had given him a permanently altered outlook on life.

“I’m not a debutante, Gina,” he said.

“Me either.”

“That I know. But even Alice, who was one, was not one. Do you know what I mean?”

Ben often brought up Alice. As if he were trying to make Gina feel better about the road her life had taken.

“Marriage must be socially and economically endogamous,” Ben said. They were cleaning the soiled pails outside in the cold brook at the back of the house.

“Excuse me? Are you allowed to say that word to women?”

He laughed. He laughed often and openly when he was with her. “It means marrying only within one’s own social stratum. Alice, released from the burden of that suffocating duty by Harry’s rejection, found herself a man and a life much better suited to her.”

“A Texan?”

“A rancher, yes. He traveled north to her lumber mill to buy a quality haul for his ranch in Abilene. She advised him on what kind and how much. A month later he was back. He said he needed more for his stables and paddocks. She advised him on what kind and how much. A month later he was back for lumber for his rodeo. Apparently it was all too subtle for Alice. Finally he asked her to travel south with him—with her mother as chaperone, of course—so she could advise him a little more specifically.” Ben laughed. “At the wedding reception, he told everyone he nearly bankrupted his father’s business pretending to procure enough lumber until the girl of his dreams married him.”

Gina still could not believe it. “How could Alice, the women’s club, parlor lounge, piano-playing, drawing-room social debutante, marry a horseman from Texas?”

“Some pairings make no sense to the outside world, it’s true.”

Gina turned red and away. Harry was a dreamer, a reader. He was all head and no hands. He was unsturdy, un-Italian, but so American. It’s what she loved most about him outside of their bed.

Ben continued. “The outdoors was always what Alice loved best. So she chose a life that had most of what she loved in it. Wide open spaces, horses, and a man who worked all day with his hands.”

Gina was thoughtful, listening, pondering, daydreaming, even as Ben was talking.

“Excuse me, what?”

“What do you think?” Ben asked. “Do you have a life that has most of what you love in it?”

“I don’t know.” She mulled it over. “I don’t own a lumber yard like Alice, so I don’t keep a ledger of such things. My life has many things that I love in it.” But her brow tightened across her strong forehead, a darkness shadowed her happy eyes. She wanted to push the curls away from her perspiring face, but her hands weren’t clean. She would not admit to Ben that her life had things she did not like in it. Lawrence. Missing pennies. Missing husband. And it sorely and gapingly lacked the one thing she wanted most. A tiny child so she could be a mother.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Is Panama what you love most?”

Ben shrugged as if he didn’t want to answer, didn’t want to tell her the truth. “The work is what I love the most. I might like Panama better if it were a suburb of Boston and didn’t give me muscle tremors, a vicious rash, and life-ending fevers.”

“Yes, that’s hardly appealing.”

“A suburb of Boston,” Ben added slowly, “perhaps like Concord.”

The valleys of the sea were exposed and the foundations of the earth laid bare at the blast of breath, O Lord, from your nostrils.

At the Massachusetts Correctional, Gina wants to tell Harry about Alice, about the horses and the prairie, but doesn’t know how to bring up or explain the provenance of this newfound knowledge. So she doesn’t.

She wants to ask Harry if his life contains most of what he loves in it, but she doesn’t know how to ask. It seems cruel to ask him this while he chafes in prison, thin, drawn, pale, with a distant look in his rainy gray eyes, a man physically there but a million miles away in his soul. She wants to ask him where he wants to be, but doesn’t dare. She is afraid. What if his answer is, not with you? Because she is right here, yet his eyes are glazed, as if they’re recalling another time, another place.

She thinks this as they sit. But what he says to her confounds her, makes her doubt her own perception of everything.

“What’s wrong with you? Why do you seem as if you’re a million miles away?” asks Harry.

“I’m here, tesoro,” she hastens to assure him, her eyes clearing, smiling at him. “Right here.”

She hands him the newspaper and watches him as he leafs through it.

“In 1911,” Harry says, “Max Eastman was asked to help restore a nearly defunct political magazine. He turned it around, and is now releasing an issue a month. You should take a look at it. It’s called The Masses.”

“Why would I want to take a look at it?”

“It’s good. It’s political. It’s funny. John Reed, Sherwood Anderson, Lincoln Steffens write for it.”

She waits. She knows him well, she knows more is coming.

“In Paterson,” he goes on, “I wrote some speeches and articles for the strike pamphlets. Max liked them. He said I had a gift. This week I got a letter from him. He said when I get out he’d like to get me on board. As an editor or a writer. Better than working for Bill, no? From your perspective, I mean.”

From her perspective, Gina sits on the side of the table from which, come two o’clock, she can get up, walk through the doors and out into the blinding sunshine. That’s her perspective. She can take a bus and go to the sea, she can buy gloves, listen to the radio, drink a cold beer, go to the library to borrow a book and to the butcher to buy a sausage. She can take a train to anywhere in the country.

“Yes,” Gina says. “From my perspective anything is better than working for Big Bill.”

“Anything?” He smiles. She wonders what else he’s got in store for her. Instead of telling her, he lowers his head into the newspaper, and reads to her stories weaved from fine print as she listens and watches him.

“Why do you read so much?” she asks in the lull. “What are you looking for?”

“The meaning of life,” he replies. “Isn’t that what everyone is looking for? Isn’t that what you’re looking for?”

Gina doesn’t reply. She wants to tell him that she thought she had found hers, but doesn’t. Until she becomes a mother, she can no longer answer. Immigrants don’t usually ask themselves these questions. They haven’t the time. Yet her father who brought her to America by the sheer force of his longing and his passion demands nothing less from her. For her dead father she will ask herself this question over and over until the answer comes to her by the awful grace of God.

“Like many men,” Harry says, “Henry David Thoreau included, I wish to discover the essential parts of life.”

“Me too,” says Gina.

“I don’t want to miss them while I’m toiling like the worker bees in the mills.”

Is there much danger of that kind of toil, she wants to ask, but doesn’t. “Are you looking for the essential parts while you’re on the picket lines in New Jersey?” she asks instead.

“Clearly. I don’t want to discover when it comes time for me to die that I haven’t lived.”

Me neither, Gina thinks, but doesn’t say, doesn’t dare say.

“But you live in prison,” she says quietly. “Away from me.” Even quieter.

“Here I am simplicity itself,” he says. “I have so few needs, so few wants.” He catches his breath when he says it, almost as if to stop himself. She waits. He is silent. “I have some wants,” he says, almost whispers.