Bellagrand: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

not your son.”
    “Charming, Harry,” whispered Gina, sitting nearby, listening.
    Mimoo bristled. “You’re my daughter’s so-called husband.”
    “I’m actually her husband.”
    “In our country, husbands, even such as you are, are considered family. Not in your country?”
    Harry said nothing.
    “Like I was saying. Besides, you’re still somebody’s son, aren’t you?”
    “Not anymore.”
    Seven
    HALFHEARTEDLY HARRY SEARCHED THROUGH the job ads in the paper. “What a burden it is,” he exclaimed one night, “to keep needing paid work.”
    “Welcome to real life,” Gina said. “Not the pretend one you’ve been living.”
    She was right, of course, and he didn’t like to argue with her. He certainly wasn’t going to argue that he did indeed once live what had seemed to him a fake life. To fall in love was one thing. But to choose her was another. He married her because she was the realest thing he had ever found. There was no calibration in his life with her. There was no pretense and no temperance. Every ball was up in the air at once. It was always too hot or too cold; there was too much wine or not enough. His bed was never empty, and that made up for many other missing things—the conjugal union of two kindred spirits, two poles apart when it came to their station in life, but one in the only way it counted. One of body, one of soul.
    Still . . . unmitigated smells and labor, constant labor. There was no time to ever think, make long-term plans, figure things out, barely even read!
    “Perhaps you’d like to move to Kalamazoo, Michigan?” Harry asked Gina. “So I could work on Henry Ford’s assembly line.”
    “The man will pay you five dollars a day, Harry,” Gina said. “That’s ransom for a prince.”
    “Five dollars?”
    “A day!”
    “Florenz Ziegfeld spends three hundred dollars on stage pillows!” Harry said. “Three hundred dollars each. ”
    “Perhaps then you should be the one selling him these magical pillows.”
    “There you go, always turning every conversation back to money.”
    “I don’t do that.”
    “Yes, you do.”
    “You mean lack of money?”
    “Whatever you want to call it.”
    And just like that, another casual spousal back-and-forth turned into intemperance. No calibration ever.
    Harry found a day job that lasted a week, delivering paper goods to local restaurants. He drove a small truck, picking up supplies from Weston and delivering them to Lawrence and Andover. The job ended a week before Christmas. Gina said nothing. He said nothing, but went out looking again. A few days later he returned home excited, and told her he had found work. She was still in her first trimester and throwing up all the time.
    “Full-time work?” Gina tried to sound excited herself.
    “Absolutely,” he said, getting the corkscrew for the celebratory red wine.
    “That’s wonderful! With who?”
    “Bill Haywood.”
    Gina stepped back from the table at which she had been about to sit. “Big Bill Haywood?” she repeated incredulously.
    “Is there another?”
    She fell quiet. Bile came up in her throat.
    “I already help Joe and Arturo with organization, ideas, planning. I’m always helping them with this speech and that. Now I’ll be paid for it. Better than doing it pro bono , no?”
    “I don’t know how to answer that,” Gina said. “What could one-eyed Bill possibly want with you, Harry?”
    “Why wouldn’t he want something to do with me?”
    “What’s the job?”
    “I don’t know. He needs something, I do it.”
    “See, that’s the part that worries me.”
    “It shouldn’t worry you.” He opened the wine and fetched two glasses. “It should make you happy.”
    “Big Bill!” she exclaimed again. “You do know that he recently stood trial for blowing up a man with a bomb, right?”
    “Come on, you know he wasn’t convicted.”
    She shook her head, but not hard; the nausea was making it difficult to react properly. “This is a terrible omen. Why