“You’re horrifying me,” he said. “What did you want?”
“Nothing.” Gina wept. “Just you. I loved you. That’s it. From the moment I met you, I loved you. I stood with you. I went to Simmons College for you and adopted a radical air for you. I pretended to be interested in other boys, so you would think I believed in free love, because that’s what the socialists believed, that’s what Emma believed.”
“It was the least attractive thing about her sermons,” Harry said.
“You say that now, because I’m your wife. Love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Remember? How you liked waking up next to the woman who believed in free love on the beach in Revere.”
“Who wouldn’t? A medfly could’ve woken up in love next to you.”
They couldn’t look at each other, remembering the ocean sands in Hampton when their entire life lay open before them.
“Please, Harry,” she whispered, her breaking voice catching on every letter. “Don’t ask me to go to Russia with you. Don’t ask Alexander to go to Russia with you.”
“Gia,” he said, “I will never leave my son behind. Never.”
“Me neither.”
“So why are you saying you want to leave him?”
“Because I don’t want us to go!”
“You can live only one life. We all have to choose. Like before. Either Boston or Bellagrand. One or the other. You can’t have both.”
Bitterness flowed through her on the dry banks of her empty rivers. “And now, as my ultimate punishment,” said Gina, “I will have neither.”
Hours passed. The day was at a standstill. Alexander, the object of their agony, would be home soon. Unfed, unquenched, unresolved, Harry and Gina undressed and in bed tried to feed and quench and resolve themselves. They always had that to fall back on, the white rumpled sheets of their mutual ardor. When Harry wasn’t at the Athenaeum translating Joseph Stalin’s “Theory and Practice of Leninism,” but home instead, he still reached for her with wanton desire, he still whispered to her the breathless words she longed to hear, he still took from her the remains of her Sicilian passion. “Man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by,” Harry whispered, kissing her open lips. “And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color . . .”
“Emma Goldman is slightly better than Green,” murmured Gina, her eyes closed, inviting his languide carezze. “But do we have to adopt the last part so literally?”
“Man is utterly helpless before love,” he whispered into her damp throat, embracing her with his body, on top of her, holding her face between his hands. “Utterly helpless before you. Tu mi hai rapito il cuore. Isn’t that what you used to whisper to me?”
Spent, they lay naked, exhausted, counting down the minutes until their boy bounded up from the street.
Harry was on his back, eyes closed. “It has been so long since you’ve whispered to me in Italian,” he said. “I cannot remember the last time.”
That was true. The Italian verbal caresses had vanished. Gina was on her side, eyes open, staring at him. “What if you’re wrong about Russia, Harry?”
He sighed. His eyes still closed, he reached for her, stroked her back, leaned over her, kissed her face, held her to him, cradling her. “I’m not going to be wrong.”
“The price you pay for being wrong is too high.” She didn’t want to say it. She didn’t want to pay it. She didn’t want to admit to him how afraid she was for Alexander.
“What are you afraid of?”
“That people smarter than you will turn out to be right.”
“Who do you know that’s smarter than me?”
“Max Eastman.”
“Don’t listen to him. The man has been in a bad mood for ten years.”
She jumped up, went to her dresser, pulled out a newspaper article she had clipped and saved, came back to bed, and lay down, squinting at the page. Soon she might need glasses.
“The universe of dialectical materialism,” Gina read out loud, “is a pantheistic god masquerading as matter and permitting itself forms of conduct equal to if not surpassing the cannibals at Carthage.”
“Eastman wrote that?” Harry smirked. “He’s really left the collective, hasn’t he?”
“Yes, after he went to Russia he left the collective.”
Harry shrugged, mock-disappointed. “He used to be such a good socialist.”
“Listen to this—”
He took the article out of her hands and threw it on the floor. “Is he back in the States?”
“Yes.”
“So he spouts crazy things like what you’ve just read, and yet, alive and well, he has returned to America?”
“Yes.”
“Cannibals at Carthage indeed.” Harry laughed. “What do you think will happen to us?”
“I don’t know. They’ll throw us in prison?”
“Darling, why would they throw us in prison? Just think about what you’re saying.”
“What about the stories of brutal suppression?”
“All lies.”
“All of it, lies? Have you read any of the letters Max sent back home? The Bolsheviks permit no departure, no matter how slight, from Bolshevism.” She snickered. “No socialists allowed should be their motto.”
“Even you have bought into the propaganda, Gina,” Harry said. “I thought you were smarter than that.”
“I’m not smarter than Max Eastman,” she said. “The man who went to Russia to live the utopian dream now writes that in order to aspire to such a dream we must set aside all of our moral principles and advocate instead for fratricide. Fratricide, Harry! He is not saying prison. Oh no. He is saying murder. Cain killing Abel because killing Abel is now the right thing to do.”
“Gina, Gina, my love. Please.” Harry rubbed his face. “Don’t you see? The people who are in jail in Russia, they call themselves ‘socialists’ now, but not five minutes ago, the guns were still warm in their hands as they fought the Bolsheviks to the death in the civil war. That’s what Max observed. Civil war, Gia, not fratricide! Those people aren’t socialists. They are White terrorists. I wrote about them not too long ago for the Daily Worker. I know all about them. They simply use that term now, ‘socialists,’ to receive mercy. They are pitiful.”
“Do you mean they are deserving of our pity?” she asked. “What if you become one of those people?” Or me? Or Alexander. She couldn’t speak her son’s name aloud.
“We’re not going to Soviet Russia to fight against the Bolsheviks!” Harry exclaimed. “Why would we do something so stupid? Why even go?”
“Good question.”
“We are going to support them. To help them.”
She fell back on the pillow. “It’s like you read the paper, but you don’t read the paper.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Her provocation made him move away from her. They were too naked and unprotected, lying so close to each other.
“The Globe every week prints stories about the counter-revolutionaries that fester in Soviet political prisons,” she said.
“It’s capitalist propaganda. I don’t read the Globe.”
“I know, I know. You read the Daily Worker. Soviet propaganda.”
“I don’t read it. I write it.”
“Harry, Max Eastman, the man who hired you for The Masses, the once ardent communist, now writes that the word capitalism has been maligned, has been made deliberately sinister. He says it is nothing more than an abstract noun. Yet this uncoordinated impersonal entity has been transformed into the devil. It is but wordplay, he writes, to make a mortal enemy out of fog.”
“Gina, I don’t want to hear about Max anymore! He’s a turncoat.”
“You revered him.”
“Until he started to betray us, yes. And you should stop reading the Globe. Don’t be so unduly influenced. You must read critically. God! What else are they going to say? They don’t even recognize the Soviet Union. They’re never going to say it
’s going swell over there.”
“Well, why not? If it is, why not?”
“Because that would endanger their whole belief system. You heard Domarind. Who wants to hear the death knell sound for their own way of life?”
“You think that’s what it is? The Americans are afraid of how great things are in Russia?”
“You should read Walter Duranty if you really want the truth about what’s going on there,” said Harry. “It’s true, a handful of counterrevolutionaries were arrested in a country of a hundred and fifty million people. There are now about five hundred of them in prison. Does that sound like a lot to you when tens of thousands are imprisoned here for speaking against that fog you call capitalism? And do you know where those five hundred are housed? Many of them are in Solovki, which is an ancient former monastery. Do you know where that is? On an island in the middle of the White Sea. Stunning surroundings, an excellent climate. Read Maxim Gorky, too. He wrote an essay about this so-called prison that I’ve recently translated.” Harry sat up in bed, eager, excited. “Health and good food is their daily regimen. That’s how the Soviets treat their enemies. I’m not making this up. The prisoners, French, German, Italian, write letters home. Maxim Gorky saw the island with his own eyes. They have walks twice a day in a grove of fruit trees.”
“Like orange groves?”
“Almost!” Harry laughed. “They have milk, tea, sugar, cigarettes, soup, meat, potatoes. Gia, they eat better than we do.”
“The poor I used to feed in the basement of Holy Lazarus eat better than we do.”
He patted her fondly. “They fish, they have lively conversations over tea and jam. There are no locks on the doors or windows.”
“Did you say Solovki is an island in the middle of the White Sea? Probably no need for locks then. Escape sounds unlikely.”
“It doesn’t sound like prison is what I mean. It’s more like the Cub Scout camp we sent Alexander to.”
“So not like prison at all?” she said.
“Exactly!”
“So just like Bellagrand?”
The breath was taken out of him for a moment. “I can see,” he said tersely, getting out of bed, “that you refuse to have a serious conversation. I’m telling you truths that should comfort you, and you make nonsensical analogies. Why even bother talking? Where was I?”
“I believe you were telling me how well we are going to live in a Soviet prison.”
“No! I was telling you how a civilized country treats its handful of political prisoners. Which is not going to be us. Unless you plan to go there to agitate.”
“Because that’s me,” she said. “An agitator.”
“You still get my blood up and boiling,” Harry said. “You agitate me, the calmest of men, into a temper.”
She opened her arms to him. He looked at her for a moment, and then came back to her. They held each other close, not moving.
“Communism is the future,” he crooned into her ear, like a love song. “Remember how you were taken with Ben”—Harry paused, deliberately—“when he kept spouting that Panama was the future? Can you allow me, your husband, the tiniest measure of the support you once accorded him?”
Ben.
It was with Ben that Gina had spoken about desire and sacrifice fifteen years ago.
“It’s time, my wife,” said Harry. “We’ve been talking about going since the October Revolution, when the idea became a reality. When the impossible was made possible.”
“Sort of like the Word was made flesh?”
“I guess.” As if he had no idea what she was talking about. She didn’t explain. “It’s time for us to go man the barricades.”
“There you go again,” she said, “inserting the language of war into the peacetime relations of men.”
“Gina! Basta!”
“You basta,” she whispered.
It was a standoff in their marital tango.
Alexander was walking home from school. Domarind was back in his office. The Justice Department was readying the deportation papers. There was nothing more to say. Gina got dressed, pinned up her hair, put on her warm walkabout coat and hat.
“Get up,” she said. “Alexander is almost home. Don’t forget to take him to his hockey practice at four.”
“Where are you going? I was going to read.”
“You can read at the rink. I’m going out,” she said. “I want to clear my head, and I need to think.”
“When you come back will you have an answer for me?”
She promised him she would.
“I want to know just one thing,” Gina said before she left. “Are you and I going to beg for mercy?”
“Never,” said Harry. “We are never going to be like those White terrorists.”
Chapter 19
PSALM 91
One
CAMBRIDGE WITH HARVARD as its jewel is most beautiful in the fall. Gina had always thought so. The inflamed vermilion beauty stopped her heart. It took the breath from her lungs, brought her hand to her chest. She felt this especially keenly today as she got off the bus on Oxford Street and tarried a little, ambling slowly toward the Science Center. Past the white fence the Japanese lanterns glowed in the distance with the promise of later, when they would be the only light in the darkness, but now, the maples, ash, oak, and willow—syrupy sugar, fire, gold, and yellow—were all in a blaze. Her chin raised, her shoulders squared, she walked. Perhaps Harvard was especially poignant to her because she suspected she might be seeing it for the last time. Just as when they knew they were leaving Belpasso, every broken-down hut, every crumbling fence, the dirt roads, the deepest blue of the sea past the calamitous Etna looming above their city, made her and Salvo cry. They said they hoped to God the place they were sailing to would have a tenth of the beauty before their eyes.
And it did. America did.
On the second floor of the Science Center, she knocked hesitantly on Ben’s office door and waited. The door opened. He stood in front of her in a double-breasted suit, well-groomed but slightly creased, as if appearances were less important than the textbooks and essays piled on his desk or the young man in a tweed jacket, looking anxious and pale, sitting in the student’s chair, fretting.
“Gina, how are you? Is everything all right?”
“Yes, of course, I don’t mean to intrude . . .” Her mouth twisted. “Do you have a moment?”
Ben glanced at the nervous student.
She stepped back. “Another time, perhaps. Please. Go ahead.”
“Can you wait?” he asked. “I have him, then two more.”
“I’ll wait.”
“You’re sure? It might be . . .”
“However long. I’ll be in the Yard.”
“I’ll find you,” he said. “Enjoy the autumn day. There’ll be a blizzard for the next three months.”
“Oh, I’m sure of it.”
Forty minutes later, Ben found her sitting on the steps of the Memorial Church, wrapped in her wool coat.
“Sorry it took so long. Academic consults take forever. Are you cold?”
“Not at all.” Then why was she shivering? “I’m glad you could get away.”
“I have a lecture at six.” He sat down on the marble steps next to her. “Did you get tired of walking?”
“I didn’t walk. I just sat here. Taking in the view.” Together they looked out onto Harvard Yard, with Widener Library rising past the magenta maples, the golden oaks. It was nearing dusk. The lanterns would be lit soon. Her heart hurt.
“You know,” Ben said, “this is where I used to sit and wait for your husband to finish class.”
“I know. He told me.” Gina and Ben sat together watching the people—young like they had been—rushing to dinner with friends, to write their essays, to evening class, to life.
Ben gave her his hand to help her off the stairs. “Let’s walk a bit,” he said. “To keep warm.” They didn’t touch each other as they meandered under the sparse brilliant canopy of th
e last bloom of fall. She didn’t put her arm through his. This wasn’t Concord in 1914. No pumpkin fair awaited them through the historic archways at the end of today.
She made some small talk: the recent events (the Dow Jones Industrial average hitting an all-time high of 381); Ben’s teaching schedule (“no time to engineer the sorely needed expansion of Mass Avenue with four courses to teach”); Alexander’s hockey abilities (prodigious); the weather (fickle); Ingersol (fine); Esther (fine); Harry (silence).
“So what’s going on, Gina? How can I help? Is he in trouble again? I heard he fired Domarind.”
She took a deep breath. She told him of her meeting with the erstwhile counsel, and the rest. They had spent all their money on legal fees, court costs, other things. What the other things were was more than Gina cared to confess to Ben. There was nothing left, she said, and Justice and State were fed up to here. They didn’t want Harry in federal prison. All they wanted was for him to leave. Which was good, because that’s all he wanted. “I fear we haven’t got much choice,” she finished, but interrogatively as if she were expecting Ben to refute, or assent.
“So let him go,” said Ben. “You stay. Stay with Alexander.”
Gina felt small like a child when she shook her head.
“You’re not seriously thinking of going to the Soviet Union? Is this devil’s advocacy?”
She didn’t reply. Not because she didn’t want to. Because she couldn’t say the impossible words out loud. We lost our American citizenship. We are going to be deported.
She told him, finally, reluctantly.
He stopped walking. “This is absolutely awful,” he said. “Does Esther know?”
“I don’t want to say anything to her until we’re certain what’s happening. Please don’t say anything. Please. Promise me.”
“Okay.” But he didn’t sound convincing.
They resumed their anguished roam in the afternoon crowd.