LITMIR.BIZ

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walked out to say goodbye. “Ben, come again. You’re always welcome.”

      “Maybe next time I could help a bit more?”

      “Help do what?” asked Gina.

      “I don’t know. This place is run by women. There must be something a man could do. Fix a window? Repair a door knob?”

      Rose put her grateful hand on Ben’s. “You know one of my deepest regrets is that no matter how I try I can never get good devoted men to come and shoulder the burden of this work, care for the sick men the way we attend to sick women.”

      Ben lowered his head to her. “I don’t know about attending to the sick, Sister Alphonsa,” he said, using the name Rose had adopted when she joined the convent. “But I’ll fix your windows and patch your doors.”

      “Oh!” Gina said. “We have dozens of projects like that.”

      “We certainly do,” said Rose. “Our Ben can also be a servant of relief.”

      After they passed Andover and neared Lawrence, Ben slowed down his vehicle. Gina hadn’t nearly finished her story of the last ten years of her life.

      “Since he got mixed up with that horrible Cyclops of a man,” Gina was telling Ben, “it’s been nothing but trouble. And do you know why?”

      “Because wherever that man goes, trouble follows?”

      “Exactly. Lawrence strike, people dead. Paterson strike, people dead.” Gina shook her head. “Do you know who else Harry met in Paterson? John Reed. Have you heard of him?”

      “No, I’m afraid not. Should I have? I haven’t been following the strikes and the radicals.”

      “And Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. She is quite the inspired feminist, that one.” Gina’s mouth tightened in flagrant disapproval. “He was gone for months gallivanting with them, carousing …”

      “Not Harry, not carousing.”

      “And then they all got arrested.”

      “For carousing? Or gallivanting?”

      “For conspiracy to incite riots. And this time he was a member of the IWW. He broke the terms of his parole five ways to Sunday. John Reed and Max Eastman bailed him out. Someone had to. His bail was set at a thousand dollars!”

      Ben tightened his grip on the wheel.

      “But now he’s in union with the Greenwich Village radicals. He calls himself a revolutionary. Harry, your oldest friend, my bookish quiet husband, a revolutionary! Can you believe it?”

      “No. Perhaps just a drawing-room revolutionary?”

      Gina shook her head. “He keeps talking of moving to New York when he gets out.”

      “When is he getting out?”

      “Not sure. He served a reduced sentence for the Paterson strike, six months or so, and not long after he got out, in May, the archduke got shot! So Harry started protesting a war that hadn’t begun. This time there wasn’t even a trial.” Gina sighed, deeply weary. “He received a mandatory five-year sentence that for a reason I can’t fathom got reduced to two. Can’t be Elston Purdy, Harry’s public defender, as he is awful. But Purdy assures me Harry will be out in time for Christmas. Apparently he’s a model prisoner.” She swallowed. “Between the arrests and the strikes, I can’t help but think he wants to be away.”

      Ben made an incredulous sound as he drove on. “It can’t be that.”

      “You don’t think so? Then why would he, knowing he’s out on probation, be charging an army recruiting station, blocking the entrance, yelling, ‘Commercial rivals are having a fight and for that our young boys are going to die?’”

      Ben shook his head.

      “While you were building and opening the engineering wonder of the modern world,” said Gina, “some man named Franz Ferdinand was murdered in Bosnia and because of a random death half a world away, my husband is once again in prison.”

      She didn’t speak again until they were back in Lawrence.

      They got home around nine. No one was in. Saturday nights Mimoo went to vespers and played bingo. Salvo was out God knows where. He told his sister he served beer in a saloon on Friday and Saturday nights. Gina and Mimoo never saw a penny of that money.

      Ben sat down at Gina’s formerly revolutionary table while she put together some potatoes with cold mustard chicken and opened a bottle of red wine. They sat down together and broke bread.

      “This is very good,” he said, eating hungrily. “But you don’t make Italian food anymore? Your brother was such a good cook.”

      “After what happened to his restaurants, no, we don’t make Italian food like we used to. No one wants to cook it, no one wants to eat it.”

      “You know, Gina,” Ben said, “years ago when I learned that Harry helped Salvo, everybody thought I was upset because of you, but really I was just jealous because I thought he’d be having Italian food every night.”

      Flushing at Ben’s casual admission that once there was a time when he might have been upset over her, Gina tried to respond in kind—lightly. “Well, Harry did have it every night,” she said lowering her eyes. “Now he has it sporadically.”

      “That’s a real shame,” said Ben. “So where’s your brother?”

      “During the week he works at Purity in the North End. On the weekends he’s back home. We see him much more now that Harry’s away. Mimoo is happy. It’s quite a predicament. On the one hand, my husband is in prison, on the other hand, my brother is home.”

      Ben finished eating. “So what happened?” he asked quietly, wiping his mouth on a napkin. “I thought the restaurants were doing so well.” He poured Gina more wine.

      “Esther didn’t tell you?”

      “Esther doesn’t know what happened. She just knows they were sold. Tell me. We have time. When is Mimoo coming home?”

      “Eleven. And she’ll be delighted to find you here.”

      Ben smiled. “Just like old times.”

      They sat at the table as Gina poured out her life to Ben, all the Salvo, Harry and Angela miseries of it.

       Five

      AFTER THE ELOPEMENT SALVO invites Harry, who’s “between jobs” to come work at the family’s two restaurants. Harry says, “Doing what? I can’t make pizza.”

      They laugh. “Of course you can’t.” Because he isn’t Italian.

      Harry mopes for days, and only when Gina presses him does he reveal to her the contents of the letter he recently received from Herman Barrington calling in the mortgage on Salvo’s two restaurants. Salvo has been slow in making the payments, and after what has transpired, Herman has no interest in remaining flexible. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you what a vindictive, cruel son of a bitch my father is. I know I should have said something sooner. Please don’t be upset with me. I tried to make it right. I even went to see him.” Harry can’t look at Gina’s dumbstruck face. “Do you know how hard that was? I went to him for help, to ask him to reconsider, to give Salvo a little more time to pay, and he wouldn’t let me in, wouldn’t come out to speak to me! Sent his lackey instead.”

      Herman’s letter about duties, responsibilities, betrayal, wrath, finalities, hangs from Gina’s hands.

      Salvo reluctantly agrees to the solution Harry proposes and meets with Ervin Cassidy, the manager of the local First National Bank of Lawrence. After much back and forth, the bank manager offers Salvo a painful compromise:

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