Читать книгу Bellagrand - Paullina Simons - Страница 18

FROM CHILDHOOD, GINA ALWAYS hated it when her mother was right. Now that she was an adult, she liked it even less. And what was worse was the number of things Mimoo was right about, and what was even more infuriating was the way her mother always knew it. Her powers of observation unabated despite faltering eyesight, onslaught of age, and general indifference, Mimoo continued to call them as she saw them.

So when Mimoo heard about the job Harry finally found, the only thing she said was, “I pray that Bill doesn’t make you his financial secretary, Harry.”

Gina glared at her impervious-to-glares mother.

When Angela had first brought Arturo home in the palm of her hand like a shiny display of male greatness, Mimoo took one look at him and barely waiting until he had left, said to her niece, “Angie, are you a fool? Do you not see that awful man is no good for you?” With Angela’s immediate family back in Sicily, Mimoo had taken it upon herself to be a surrogate mother to the young woman.

Angela kissed her. “You think no one is good enough for me, Mimoo. I love you.”

“No,” Mimoo said calmly. “Just him.”

“But he is wonderful! He writes poetry. He studied to be a seminarian …”

“Is he in the seminary now?”

“Well, no …”

“Exactly.”

In 1908 Emma Goldman had been scheduled to speak on the Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Drama. Gina had asked Harry if he wanted to go and he said, “I don’t want to go to Boston right now. Or possibly ever again. Anarchism and socialism are like two magnetic norths. You go. Take Angela with you.”

“You never want to come with me anywhere anymore,” Gina said. “You used to come to all my meetings before we were married.”

“That was courtship,” Harry replied. “Listening to anarchic blather equating marriage to slavery. Nodding my head at sermons against subjugated women. That’s the way I got you to marry me.”

“You’re teasing me, mio sposo.”

“Am I? Are you married to me or no?”

Angela started going with Gina instead, like Verity once used to. Together they listened to “The Economic Crisis: Its Cause and Remedy,” “Syndicalism: A New Phase of the Labor Struggle,” “Woman Under Anarchism,” and “The Relation of Anarchism to Trade Unionism.”

The last was the speech that changed Angela’s life, though according to Mimoo not for the better, because that’s when she met Arturo Giovannitti.

Arturo had emigrated from Naples in 1901, barely speaking English. He was tall, good-looking, arrogant, loud. He had indeed studied briefly at the Theological Seminary. Heavy-set, thick-browed Angela, friendly, happy, for years waiting for a suitable man, was smitten. She never had a chance. “Like me, Harry,” Gina had said, nonplussed when he didn’t reply right away. “You mean like me,” he said to her, upon further nudging.

Arturo described himself as a union leader, a socialist, a poet, and he brought with him to the conference center his friend, Joe Ettor, “Smiling Joe” of the Industrial Workers of the World. Joe cast his eyes on the dark-haired, tall and dramatic Gina, who flashed her wedding ring and invited him back to Lawrence to meet her husband. Joe got the hint, but came for dinner anyway. He and Harry hit it off—that evening and many evenings that followed expounding on Marx’s dialectical materialism and on economic development being the foundation of all life. Evening after joyful inebriated evening they played cards, told jokes and dreamed of a true socialist state, one that didn’t yet exist, where money, prices and markets were abolished, and all capitalist property confiscated and divided among the people.

Joe and Arturo became fascinated by Lawrence, the woolen and worsted production center of the world, a flourishing yet deeply troubled textile town. Joe had worked as a waterboy on railroads, filed saws at lumber mills, was a barrel maker, a shipyard worker, and had been last employed at a cigar factory. He began his work with the IWW as a community organizer and became an outstanding public speaker. He spent years taking Arturo with him, traveling the country and organizing miners, migrant laborers and foreign-born workers. Twice he had persuaded Harry, who just happened to be in between jobs, to go with him and Arturo to help them write their speeches. Both men looked up to Harry, revering his contemplative bookishness. Where they were brash, he was quiet, where they shouted, he spoke softly, where they were full of rhetorical passions, he engaged coolly in reasoned argument.

Aided by Harry’s speechwriting, they had put together the Brooklyn shoe factory strike earlier in 1911. Buoyed by the success in Brooklyn, Joe and Arturo returned to Lawrence, rented two rooms off Lowell Street, close to where Angela now lived with her friend Pamela, and settled into intoxicated vigilance. They were convinced something big was going to happen in Lawrence, and they wanted to be there when it did.

And so during Christmas of 1911, Arturo huddled with Angela, Harry and Joe at the little round table like battle headquarters in the kitchen of Mimoo’s rented house on Summer Street and tried to make heads or tails of American Woolen’s recent actions. Gina stood by the kitchen sink and watched warily, nervous before, nauseated now. Why was she agreeing with Mimoo? Why did this agitation around Christmastime smell like nothing but a pot of trouble?

The Lawrence mills were the world’s largest producers of textile products and needed vast numbers of laborers, mostly unskilled and underage women. After the invention of the two-loom system, the pace became grueling, the repetition and boredom dangerous, and the frequent injuries job-and-family-destroying. So after the textile union vigorously lobbied for two fewer hours of work a week, the Massachusetts legislature cut maximum hours from fifty-six to fifty-four. Fred Ayer and his son-in-law William Wood of American Woolen, who owned and operated all the mills in Lawrence, said with nary a complaint: ladies, you wanted it? It is done. Merry Christmas.

American Woolen’s instant agreement prompted a sudden and direct action of the entire cauldron’s brew of the IWW to descend onto Lawrence in December of 1911 like it was Paris in 1789. The main question on every socialist’s mind was: why would American Woolen give in to the demands so quickly? This puzzled the four heads on Summer Street, and unsettled Gina.

Salvo didn’t come home for Christmas, his absence a black sore at the table. Mimoo and Gina didn’t discuss it. Mimoo prayed more than usual, which is to say, nearly all day. It was Christmas, after all, she said. Prayers were in order. But on Christmas Eve she couldn’t help herself, she accused Harry of heartlessness in abandoning his family.

“Do you not see me?” she said to him, having had too much holiday cheer in the form of red port. “I don’t have my son on Christmas. I weep with despair. You don’t think your father and your sister feel the same about not having you with them on Christmas?”

“No, I don’t think they do.”

“You’re blind inside your soul!”

“Mimoo, they threw me out,” Harry said in self-defense. “I didn’t leave like Salvo, of my own free will. They forced me out, told me I would never be welcome in their home again. My father disowned me. He stopped my access to our family accounts. They did this because I had the gall to marry your daughter.”

Mimoo harrumphed in agreement. “He felt betrayed by you. He lost his temper.”

“My father never loses his temper. He said exactly what he meant. He did exactly what he intended. He told me he didn’t have a son anymore.”

“You’re a fool, Harry. Gina, you married a fool. Do you know how impossible what you’re saying is? A father cannot abandon his children.”

Gina tried to comfort her mother. “Mimoo, they’re not like us,” she said. “They don’t feel the same way about their children.”

Mimoo staggered from the table. “You don’t think a man feels most deeply about his only son?” she said. “Are you even my daughter? Think what you’re saying. His only son!”

“Honestly, Mimoo, believe him.”

“A man who doesn’t feel deeply about his son feels deeply about nothing.”

“Well, then, Mimoo,” said Harry, “perhaps you’ve answered your own question.”

Holding on to the railing, the old woman slowly climbed the stairs, refusing Gina’s help. “You are both blind. Because you haven’t had children. Just you wait. Wait till August. Then you’ll understand.”

They rang in the New Year of 1912 with champagne and roast pig. Arturo told Angela that maybe this summer, if all went well, they could be married.

Mimoo snorted all the way up the stairs, loudly enough for everyone to hear.

“Mimoo, you’re embarrassing him,” said Angela after the men had left. “You know he can hear you, right?”

“I hope the dead can hear me. Madre di Dio. Do you hear me? Did he give you a ring?”

“He doesn’t have the money right now.”

“He has money to spend on his cigarettes and train rides all across the country, doesn’t he? And every time I see him he’s wearing a new suit.”

“Rings are expensive,” Angela said, calling downstairs to her cousin. “Gina, how much was your ring?”

In the kitchen cleaning up the wine glasses, Gina inquisitively tapped at Harry, reading the paper. “How should I know?” he said with a shrug. “I walked into the jewelers and picked out the largest stone. My father got the bill.”

Gina stared at the fourth finger on her left hand. The two-karat princess-cut diamond sparkled. She cleaned it every morning, even before she cleaned her teeth. It was like something out of someone else’s life.

“He says it wasn’t that expensive, Mimoo,” Gina yelled up to the bedroom.

“Is he going to lure you into a pretend marriage,” Mimoo asked Angela, “like that Harry with my daughter?”

“Mimoo, we are not in a pretend marriage!” Gina called from downstairs. “And also, Harry can hear you.”

“No, Mimoo,” said Angela, sitting on the corner of the bed and smiling. “Unlike Harry with Gina, Arturo is going to marry me properly, in a church. Because as you know, the Italian atheist rhetoric is all for show. There is no such thing as an Italian atheist.”

Downstairs, Harry glanced up from his newspaper to catch Gina’s eye for a reply to the truth of that. She crossed herself and bowed in assent before kissing him with champagne on her lips.

“There is also no ring,” an implacable Mimoo pointed out upstairs.

Gina waved her ring hand at Harry, wondering how much her rock was worth and if she pawned it, would she ever be able to get together the money to buy it back.