The disappointment must have shown brutally on her face. He took a step away, his back pressed against the bookshelf.
“Don’t be cross because you can’t remake me into the man you want me to be,” he said. “You can’t even remake yourself into the woman you want to be.”
“In this also, you are wrong,” Gina said. “I am how I wish to be. I have remade myself like this.” She swallowed, her throat dry. “I thought you were done with it all.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because that’s what you told me. It was in the past. Nothing more than the foolishness of our youth.”
“Is that what it was to you? Foolishness?” Now he looked disappointed in her.
“No. It was youth.” It took a titanic effort not to throw at him the empty glass she was holding. She waved her hands across the great unknown, to the great beyond. Most things in the universe were completely beyond her understanding. “Since 1919, when your father saved you from ten years in prison,” Gina said, “you’ve been promising all of us you were finished with the things that put you there.”
“And you believed me?”
“I did,” she said. “Not your father. You couldn’t hide it from him. He knew! All along he knew. He kept trying to warn me. He said as much. I didn’t listen. But tell me, were you ever planning to show me the face you’ve been hiding?”
Harry thought about it—or pretended to think about it. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “You were so happy. I didn’t want to ruin things.”
“Ruin things,” she repeated. “What was I happy with? Fraud?”
“Happy with me. And I wasn’t deceiving you. Not really. You were content to look the other way.”
“I was oblivious,” said a demoralized Gina. “That’s not the same. I wasn’t looking the other way.” But even now she couldn’t look directly at him.
“I guess,” Harry said, as if he didn’t believe it. As if even he didn’t believe he had kept himself that well hidden. As if he wanted to chide her for not paying closer attention. He walked around to her side of the couch. She stood quietly, her shoulders slumped. She was vanquished. He took her hands in his. “Gia . . . listen to me,” he murmured. “It is only right that idealists like us, who have stopped believing in God, should seek some other way to make out of earth a heaven, out of men and women earthly angels—selfless, altruistic, hardworking, resolute, strong.”
She pulled her hands away from him. “I don’t fit into your model of the perfect socialist, Harry,” she said. “I’m not an idealist like you. You have me all wrong. I have not stopped believing in God.”
He shook his head, persisted. “You are an idealist.”
Vehemently Gina denied it. “Not me. Idealists see the world as it is, find it wanting, and then strive to remake it into how they think it should be.”
“Yes!” he exclaimed, as if they were in full agreement.
“That’s not me,” said Gina. “That’s never been me. I’m all for improvement of course . . .” She paused. “Like a Christian. Knowing I will fail, I strive to be better. I struggle to be good. But what I’m not is an idealist. I see the world for what it is, but think a little better of it.”
“Like me?” He smiled. “You see me for what I am, what I always was, what you fell in love with, and accept me anyway?”
She wanted to whisper yes, but couldn’t.
He stopped smiling. “So what do you call that, then? What do you call yourself?”
“A romantic,” Gina replied.
They stood apart as if at separate fronts. He was unrepentant, acting as if he had done nothing wrong, and it was she who had transgressed.
“How did you manage to do this and go to school?” She blanched. “Is this why the degree has been taking so long?”
He said nothing in response, but seemed to be chewing over the truth.
“Is this why you decided on Tufts instead of your alma mater, the place that educated your family going back ten generations? Because it would be easier to keep this heady deception going?”
“No.” He spoke coldly. “I chose Tufts because I wouldn’t be dragged to be lynched into the square where your Panamanian ditch digger is teaching. Why didn’t you tell me he was at Harvard?”
For a moment Gina was speechless. “What does that have to do with this?” Now it was she who became unrepentant. “What does it have to do with you? You are using Ben to lie to me? You aren’t getting an engineering doctorate, are you?”
“Still.”
“Still nothing! It should’ve taken you a year to finish. You could’ve been done in nine months and never had to lay eyes on him.”
“I was starting from the beginning. You mean two years. And is that what you hoped for? That I’d never run into him?”
“I didn’t hope for anything. I didn’t think about it.”
His stance, his glance, remained accusing. “I don’t believe you.”
“Be that as it may.”
“Well, just imagine my tidy humiliation,” said Harry, “when I accidentally bumped into him on my second or third day there, taking a stroll in the Yard. He was quite surprised, too.”
“To see you?”
Harry smirked dismissively. “That you didn’t tell me he was there. He lectures there now. They’ve offered him tenure. He decided to accept. The gall of that man! Do you know he actually said to me that if there was anything I needed, anything at all, not to hesitate to ask him. Imagine!”
She covered her face. Not out of shame. To stop herself from screaming.
“What does Ben have to do with what I saw you doing this afternoon?” An awful realization struck Gina. “Tell me, are you or are you not attending Tufts?”
Harry was silent. “No,” he finally said. “I’m not.”
“You never attended?” She grabbed on to the chair for strength.
“I never attended.”
“And the Athenaeum . . .”
“Oh, I go there to work. It’s remarkable there. I am left in peace. I get so much done.”
“What work are you talking about!” Anger made her ramrod straight. “You’ve been lying to me, to your son, to your sister for years. Getting your doctorate, Thermopylae, the Greeks, King Leonidas, all complete bullshit! You lied to me about leaving your radicalism behind, about what you do each and every God-given day when you’re away from this house—and you bring up Ben at Harvard?” Her chest was closing up. Panic. She couldn’t take a breath deep enough to continue speaking.
“Stop shouting! We’re not in Sicily. Do you want Alexander to hear you?”
She lowered her voice. He was so good with words, wielding them like a hammer over her anvil. “What else besides your communism are you hiding from me?”
“Don’t be absurd.” He tapped his heart. “Communism is my only mistress. I’ve joined the Workers Party.” That was the current moniker of the Communist Party of the United States of America, forced to go underground by the Red Scare of 1919, the year Alexander was born. What a momentous year 1919 had been.
“But what have you been doing with yourself?” She pushed breath through her closing lungs. “Three years of what, Harry?”
“Three years of revolution in secret, Gina. Even you couldn’t know. Three years of translating Soviet pamphlets into English. That’s how good my Russian is now,” he said proudly. “I learned while I was in prison and I’ve put it to good use.”
“Translating.”
“Yes. I’m the Boston editor-at-large of the Daily Worker,” he said. “I co-write and edit many of the longer articles we publish. And like Ben’s mother, Ellen, many moons ago, I’m starting a new organization. It’s called the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. I’ve just finished a month-long study on unemployment and how to fight it.”
“You find no irony in that?”
“I won’t be baited by you.”
“No?”
“No. You want to know what I’ve been doing w
ith my time? I’ll tell you. I’ve been extraordinarily busy. I’m proud to say I helped James Cannon with the research for his monumental piece, ‘The Fifth Year of the Russian Revolution,’ one of the most influential pamphlets the Workers Party has produced.”
She stood without words. He stood and counted off his accomplishments on his fingers.
“After Lenin died, I wrote a ten-thousand-word piece on his life and work. I was the one who wrote the famous letter from the Communist International to the Mexican Communist Party that’s been recently quoted by all the newspapers in America. I edit the arts section, and co-edited the Poems for Workers anthology. I’m very proud of that one. And I publicly advocate for the Workers Party, what it stands for and why everyone should join, which is what you saw me doing today.”
“Are you done?”
“No,” he said. “My point is that in the three years prior to these three years, I was doing fuck all. Lollygagging in a beach bungalow. But these past three years, I’ve been alive!”
Her knees would not give way. She was made dense by incomprehension, like a block of concrete.
“And I did it without anyone knowing,” he continued, all his feathers up. “Not just you, but, more importantly, Femmer. My goal was to work, but to keep it underground. Now that he’s out of my life, we don’t have to worry.”
“How proud you must be. The way you were carrying on today in a public place, it’s only a matter of time before they catch up with you. The Red Scare hasn’t passed.” It’s right here on Mt. Vernon Street, she wanted to add. “You think there won’t be a crackdown? That you can just keep living like this?”
He nodded.
“And the promise you made me in the beach bungalow?” Gina asked. “When you said you would do right by me, by Alexander, that you would stick by your family?”
“I am sticking by my family,” he said. “I am devoted and true. The question is,” he added, “whether my family is devoted and true to me.”
Gina squeezed the glass she was holding so tightly that it shattered in her hand and cut her fingers and palm before falling to the floor. Harry stepped forward to help her, but she flung out her arms to block him, drops of crimson blood flying between them.
“You were going to get your degree,” she said, her voice breaking. “You were going to get a respectable job, become a professor, become something.”
“Why are you overreacting like this?” he exclaimed. “What’s changed? I’m still the same man I always was.”
“But I thought you were going to be a new man!” She could barely speak. “What’s your plan? Yelling, protesting on Boston streets? Translating Soviet propaganda for the Daily Worker? Is that your permanent strategy? Writing articles on the differences between Leninism and Trotskyism? Are they even paying you?” She saw his face and laughed bitterly. “I thought so. You’re about to turn fifty. Are you just going to keep doing this? Little by little tearing down everything?”
“Not little by little,” he said. “The strike-breaking and the union-destroying actions of the American democracy continue unabated. They must be stopped. Passaic, New Jersey, is in a struggle against starvation wages—”
“Oh God! Stop it! Stop speaking!”
“Stop shouting!”
“Who’s going to save you this time, Harry?” she whispered, wrapping the hem of her skirt around her injured hand. “Who is left to save you?”
“I don’t need anyone to save me. I don’t need saving.”
But who is going to save me? Gina wanted to ask as she crept out of the room like the war-wounded. Who is going to save your son?
Three
GINA WAS NUMB for two days, the shock wearing off slowly, her hand scabbing over, her heart too, but once the fog in her head cleared and the wound healed, she started to make quiet plans to leave with Alexander and go to Tequesta to stay with Salvo until she figured things out. In her outward life she still met with Meredith and her other friends, helped at St. Vincent’s, cooked dinner, picked up Alexander from school and did homework with him, even entertained Esther on Sundays. Inside she gnawed on the bone of how best to leave. She suspected that if she informed Harry of her plans he might not let her go, or worse, he might prevent her from taking Alexander, because he knew that without her boy she would and could never go anywhere permanently. But how could she swipe Alexander from his father without a goodbye?
It was impossible.
Weeks passed as she watched her son happy in his life, watched him having fun with his father, watched Harry at home, the same as always: dry-witted, modestly affectionate, calm, serious of purpose, affable, parentally straight. After seething in secret, she soon began questioning the wisdom of her intended actions. She began wondering if Harry had been right, if she might not have overreacted. Was she really going to hold him to the promises made to Janke when he was under house arrest? At the same time, whenever Harry left the house in the morning, Gina was filled with churning dread until he returned. She was afraid he would be apprehended on the street like a common criminal, and she would have to explain that to Alexander. Neither of her alternatives was easy: taking the boy to Florida for a little time apart, or staying in Boston and seeing Harry, a Barrington no less, a first Bostonian, a citizen of Beacon Hill, behind bars for being a communist? Neither she nor Alexander would be able to show their faces anywhere in the city, not the school or the park, or the shops on Charles Street and Newbury, where everyone knew them by name.
She stopped sleeping in their marital bed. Two weeks, then three she stayed in one of the guest rooms. Harry did not come in, beg her to come back, ask what she was doing. At night he would read and work at his round table by the window, and when he got tired, he would go to bed. In the morning, he would come down to breakfast, in his suit, ready for his day, have some bread, eggs, a sip of tea, and be on his way.
All day he was gone from her house. All night she was gone from his bed.
Once, Alexander asked him what he was going to do that day, and after brief eye contact with Gina, he said, “I’m writing a long article, son, on how American imperialism is the greatest menace of the capitalist world.”
“What’s menace?”
“Alexander,” said Gina, “let your father go. Can’t you see he is late?”
How easy she had been to deceive! Three years to get his doctorate! He fed her his lies, and she swallowed them like a sheep, with nary a bleat. She was being punished for her sins. Absolutely. This is what it must have been like to be Alice twenty years ago. Harry had been five minutes away from finishing his doctorate—and then he crashed into Gina at the narrow pass through the Harvard gates. While Alice was busy planning their wedding, their trip to the volcanoes of Europe, Harry was under crisp white sheets with Gina, all their weapons surrendered. Blissfully oblivious, Alice prepared for the future, not knowing that the life she was living was a mirage and the man she loved an illusion.
Gina felt like that now.
That’s why she never pried. She closed her heart, her eyes, pretended it all was fine. He was right. She didn’t want to know. Because in the bitter light, she had only two options. Leave. Or stay.
In this manner of purgatory, the summer passed. Cape Cod with Esther, Cub Scouts, clamming.
Gina continued to live, paralyzed, motionless, frozen in place.
She knew what kind of a mother she was, but what kind of a woman was she? What kind of a wife? She cooked for him, and cleaned for him, but refused to touch him, refused to lie down with him. Eventually she would force his hand and he would leave her, to get elsewhere what she no longer offered him, what he no longer took from her.
Whom could she talk to about this? Why did his communism isolate her from other people? Why did the philosophy of brotherhood, of collective ethic, of fraternal community, alienate her from the rest of the world more successfully than any solitary confinement? Perhaps she could contribute an article about that to the Daily Worker, for free, of course, because they clearly h
ad no money to pay her. Communism as the greatest force of alienation in the modern world.
Whom could she turn to?
Esther? She and Esther were like a divorced couple. Courteous for the sake of the child they both cared for, and nothing more, even when they got together at Esther’s summer home in Truro. Gina carried herself as if always on the verge of leaving. Meredith? The woman who couldn’t understand why Walter and Alexander might want to play ball after school in the park? Meredith and the others talked about clothes and museums, not marital problems. Gina was the wife of a man who preached the coming end of Boston’s easy life to the residents of Boston! Her current friends would be aghast if she were to tell them the truth about her husband, the civil man who sat in their parlor rooms on Saturday nights and let his objection simmer on low while all around him the political waters heatedly boiled over.
Her old friend Verity, with a team of children in a noisy home? To talk to Verity, Gina would have to go to Lawrence.
She couldn’t talk frankly to Salvo. His only advice would be to leave Harry instantly.
Ben?
Oh, God help her.
Rose Hawthorne was not well, and in any case, now lived in New York. Gina had not seen Rose since their return. No short day trip to Concord to ask Rose for a dose of wisdom.
Her options narrowing, Gina returned to Harry’s bed. He was as fervent and intimate as ever. “I’m so glad you are with me,” he whispered. “That you’ve finally realized it’s just a tempest in a teapot.”
She cried.
Afterward, this was their pillow talk.
“Gia, we still refuse to recognize the Soviet Union!”
“Perhaps we think it’ll go away if we ignore it.”
“Russia is not going anywhere. It’s not capitalism, Gia. It doesn’t eat itself.”
“Maybe they hope it will. Eat itself.”
“Who is this they?” He was too agitated to hold her in his arms. “This is coming from the American Federation of Labor, no less! Did you read the Globe today?”