When did Gina tell Rose this, Harry wondered, glancing at an impassive and composed Gina sitting between them. “Adjunct professor,” he corrected her. He didn’t want to lie to a nun, of all people.
“And you’re completing your doctorate this year?”
“Slowly, but yes,” he said, as if in a confessional. He hoped they would get to Back Bay sooner rather than later. He didn’t want to hazard what else he would have to divulge to the nun if she asked.
“Gina tells me you’re quite progressive in your politics.”
What did that mean? “I suppose so,” he drew out. “But only if it’s good to be progressive in your politics.”
Rose laughed gently. “I believe very much what my father believed on this issue,” she said, “that no matter how lofty our objectives, the only true reformation should begin and end with the human heart. Without the slow progress of conscience on that score, all our other projects will be doomed to fail.”
“I agree with you wholeheartedly,” Harry said.
“Do you?”
“Why, yes. In my dissertation, I extrapolate at length about this very thing.” He took a breath as he drove carefully, not to jostle the divine sister. “Form follows function. Content follows form. But form lags for a while behind its content. So first our external conditions must change. And then our ideas, habits, customs and beliefs will change accordingly.”
Rose looked at him bemused. Glancing sideways at Gina, she said, “Hmm. That’s actually the opposite of what my father meant.”
Harry frowned. His hands tightened on the wheel. He wasn’t going to argue with a nun, but he was convinced they had been talking about the same thing.
“What I think is,” Rose said, “that the passionate improver of mankind through the false means of external conditions will more often than not turn out to be the destroyer of souls.”
“Oh, look,” Harry said. “Here we are. Clarendon Street. Why don’t I let you off on Commonwealth, while I go find a space to park?”
They waited for him on the cool and darkened street.
Once inside the house, Harry wanted Gina to wait in the hallway, but didn’t know how to say that to her. He said, “Let Rose go in by herself. We’ll wait here.”
“Don’t be silly, child,” Rose said, beckoning them both. “Come. Do God’s work and sit by the sick.”
On the first floor of Ellen’s narrow corner brownstone, Josephine lay in the parlor room in a makeshift hospital bed. No more Anti-Imperialist or the New York Consumer League. In her own refuge for women, Josephine, reduced and diminished, half a Josephine, looked like she was sleeping. Rose went up to her, whispered, prayed, said Josephine … and the sick woman opened her eyes. She was too weak to sit up and greet her distinguished visitor whom she recognized immediately; nor did Rose desire it. Josephine’s eyes traveled around the room. Imperceptibly, Harry stepped slightly in front of Gina as if to shield her from view. Josephine’s gaze stopped on Harry, traveled from him to the groomed Italian woman standing next to him, and darkened.
“Harry, is that you?” she said, attempting to sit up and failing. “You naughty boy. You haven’t visited me in over a month, and now you come unannounced and bring guests? Rose Hawthorne of all people? How are you, Sister Alphonsa? I’m happy and yet desperately unhappy to see you at my side.”
Rose took Josephine’s hands into her own. The nurse standing nearby made a throaty sound, and pointed, she thought surreptitiously, to the plastic gloves that covered her hands to the elbows. Rose’s expression hardening, she caressed Josephine’s arms up and down with her bare hands, and said to the nurse, “Can you please go make us a spot of tea? With honey and lemon. And for your future information, cancer patients are not contagious. Not the least bit so. You may remove your gloves with impunity.”
Josephine watched Rose with respectful bemusement. “How can you be sure?”
“Eight years of experience.”
“Next you’ll say lepers are not contagious.”
“Oh no, they are, quite,” Rose said calmly. “We still don’t wear gloves when we minister to them.” She perched on Josephine’s bed, not letting go of her hands. Harry and Gina continued to stand at the foot of the bed. Josephine continued to eye Gina, much the way Rose had just eyed the fastidious nurse. Cold seeped into her ailing gaze, a judgment. This didn’t go unnoticed, not by Harry, not by Gina—and not by Rose, who, kneading her rosaries, opened the Bible and said, “Gina is the reason I’m here. She asked me to come, to pray with you. Shall we pray?”
Josephine closed her eyes.
For ten or fifteen minutes, Rose’s lips moved loudly, inaudibly, in a tidal cadence. No one else spoke. Josephine lay without reaction.
“Effie,” said Rose, “how old are you, dear one?”
“Sixty-one.”
“So young. I am fifty-four. I thought you were a New Yorker. Why are you here?”
Josephine opened her eyes, stared accusingly at Harry, then at Rose. “Why are you here?”
“To help you.”
“But I am not impoverished.”
“No. You are rich with love. Look at Harry who’s known you for fifteen years. Look at Gina Attaviano, who has met you once and yet went in the night to Concord to bring me here for you. You should go home, Josephine. Go home to New York. Your mother awaits you. Your other loving sisters. We’ll transport you. You need the rest of your family with you now. And they need you.”
Josephine shook her head.
“I know you don’t want to burden them. But you must go home to your daughter. Carlotta knows you’re a good woman. Now show her what a strong woman you still are.”
“I do not feel strong. Not particularly good.”
“You are both. I can arrange for you to be transported back.”
“No, I can’t move from this bed.”
“You can,” said Rose. “I’ve seen a lot of sick people. It’s not yet your time.”
Josephine looked at quiet, kind Rose, with her serene voice, and hope mixed with something else flickered in her eyes. “You know my daughter is not in New York,” Josephine said, nodding toward Harry. “She is here in Boston. As is my sister, Ellen. As will be her son, Ben, who is, as we speak, on his way home from Panama. We are all here for this boy’s imminent wedding.”
Harry’s stomach dropped out from under him like he was falling. He held his breath and said nothing and looked at no one.
Rose turned her steady gaze on Harry, and on motionless Gina by his side, who was clutching the footpost of the bed. “The wedding is not until July, I believe,” Rose said slowly, turning her gaze back to Josephine. “Your illness has imposed limitations on you that make you struggle. One nurse is not enough, I can see that by her exhausted demeanor. The last thing you need right now is conflict. You should be with the sisters who can care for you around the clock. Why don’t you come stay at our home in Concord? Carlotta can take you there.”
“I thought you ran the Rose Hawthorne Home for Impoverished Women?”
“It’s called Rose’s Home,” corrected Rose. “For the sickest of the sick and the poorest of the poor.” Rose stood from the bed. “You want to be loved? That’s where you go.”
The drive back was silent. “Josephine is a remarkable woman,” Rose said to Harry. “You must forgive her.”
“Nothing to forgive,” said Harry. He wanted to say that if only he were a woman, and incurable, he might like to go to Rose’s Home where he might be loved. He felt precious little of it in his car at that moment. Gina had not uttered a word.
“Harry,” said Rose, when they were almost at Wayside, “have you had the opportunity to read my father’s stories, either ‘Earth’s Holocaust’ or The Marble Faun?”
“I haven’t had that opportunity, I’m afraid.”
“In The Marble Faun he writes that sin, for all its consequences, may be enlightening. Because although it burns, it wakens.”
“Well, here we are,” Harry said, pulling up to
the darkened gate and pulling on the brake. He thought a moment and then turned the ignition off. “Let me walk you inside.”
“One can pretend sin is a theological sham,” Rose said to him, as she hopped out of the Curved Dash, “but only at one’s own peril. Goodnight, Harry. Gina can walk me inside. Come with me, Gina.”
Harry got out of the car, helped the women out, though one of them was an icy woman and did not take his proffered hand. He closed the gate behind them, taking care to close it quietly, not slam it, climbed behind the steering wheel and waited. For one second, maybe as many as ten, he contemplated turning the crank and driving away. It was a moment that would remain with him for many years to come.
2
Gina got back in the car, and he could almost hear her wondering if she should climb into the child’s seat in the rear so that she wouldn’t have to sit next to him. But she stayed put. So did he.
“Well, are you going to get going or not?” she said. “I’ve got early classes tomorrow. It’s nearly 10:30 already.”
He sighed. “That’s all you have to say to me?”
“There is more to say?”
He turned the crank, drove down the block, but didn’t get far before she spoke.
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
And he told her the truth. “No.”
“You were going to just get married and say nothing?”
“I didn’t know what to say.”
“So your plan was to say nothing?”
He said nothing.
“Rose is right, sin burns, yet wakens,” Gina said. “How fallen do you have to be, Harry Barrington, to live like this and yet shamelessly demand from me every day why Archer, my good and faithful friend, keeps coming by?”
Harry allowed himself a pretend casual shrug. “I feel what I feel,” he said. “That I can’t help.”
“You know what you can help, though?” she snapped. “How you act. How you carry yourself. What you show to the world.”
“I didn’t know what to do. This caught me by surprise.” You caught me by surprise.
“What caught you by surprise, Harry?”
“I’m sorry you had to find out like this.”
Now she laughed, falsely hearty. “For that you’re sorry? Harry,” she said, and he could only guess at the expression in her eyes since he couldn’t face her. “Just so you know, you were the only one who was surprised by tonight. I’ve known all along.”
He shook his head in disbelief.
“Oh yes. Since before you ran into me at Harvard. I read all about your impending nuptials in the newspaper announcement last March. I knew about it. Sophie too. Miranda and Julia. Rose—yes, even she. My mother knew about it. Angela. Salvo knew about it. You don’t want to know what he had to say when he found out whom you were marrying. Everyone knew, Harry,” she said. “The only one who seemed not to know about it was you. Are you surprised you’re getting married? Has it sprung on you like a leak?”
They sat. He reached out to take her hand, and she yanked her whole body away from him, nearly falling out.
He caught her by her upper arm, brought her to him, held her. “I have no life,” Harry said. “Don’t turn away from me. Don’t pull away. You know, you know I can’t take one breath in a day that doesn’t have you in it.”
“Don’t try to win me over now. What’s the point?”
“Don’t be flippant with me, Gina. You flung yourself into my heart, poured yourself into me like magma, don’t pretend what I’m saying is false. You know that my first thought and last thought and every thought in between is you.”
“I asked you to stop. This isn’t helping.”
“You’re right, you will be the ruin of me.”
“I don’t want you …”
“Don’t speak.”
“Harry, you’re getting married!” Gina cried, with shaking hands, trembling lips, a quavering voice. She lunged at him, flung her arms at him. “In three weeks you’re going to marry another woman! You’re going to marry Alice!” She put her face into her hands and sobbed.
“Gina,” he whispered to her on the dark street, under the lamps all burned down, on an avenue so quiet they were the only two people awake. “I cannot marry Alice.”
“And yet …”
“I can’t not marry Alice.” He groaned, doubling over the steering wheel.
She groaned too. They sat apart, speechless in their misery.
He began to speak, but she shook her head vehemently to cut him off.
“I just want one day of strength,” he said. So I can know what to do.
“Who’s going to give it to you, Harry?”
“You.”
“You’re wrong. You can’t ask your lover to be your judge. I’m not the one to give you strength. You don’t give me strength. You make me weak. You haven’t prayed a day in your life, have you?”
“When my mother died was the last time.”
“What did you pray for?”
“That it wasn’t so.”
“Well, you might need a little of that praying spirit now,” she said. “Because this is so.”
“Gia, please.”
“You want me to give you strength? All right,” she said, folding her arms over her heart. “Here it is. Drive me home. Let me off at the Fenway, say goodbye, go home to Barrington. Don’t look back. Never even think back. Blow me a kiss as you leave. That’s how you do it.”
“You know that’s impossible.”
She expressed her doubt in an anguished cry. “You are Harold Barrington! That’s the truth of who you are. And I’m Gina Attaviano from Belpasso. That’s who I am. My father the barber scolded me to remember where I came from. So I give you a little bit of his wisdom. Remember where you came from, Harold.”
“Did you not hear when I said to you that you have left me for a blank?”
“You’re afraid of me,” she said suddenly. “You’re about to marry another woman, you’re five minutes from walking down the aisle with her and you are too afraid to tell me! You’re afraid of your father. Harry, you’ve spent your life being afraid. God help you. Don’t choose, don’t even think about it. I’m telling you what to do. Go do what you were born to do. Go do what you were meant to.”
“You don’t mean it.”
“With all my heart,” said Gina. “Don’t fracture yourself for me. You aren’t mercury.” She didn’t bother to wipe her face. “You can’t form back into a whole. Your fragmented self won’t put itself back together.” But she was crying desperately.
“You want me to marry someone else?” he yelled.
“Yes!”
“You mean that?”
“Yes,” she said, weeping into her sleeve, her shoulders heaving. “Because my love is greater than my selfishness. You can’t be divided. You have to remain whole. That is my commandment. That is what Rose Hawthorne was counseling you.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to marry Alice,” she said, not looking at him. “You can’t humiliate her three weeks before the wedding. She doesn’t deserve it.”
“You’re mad, you’ve gone mad. You think this is the sin? What about living a life that’s a fraud from morning until night? That’s not a venal sin? Corruption, deceit, pretense, hypocrisy, what do you think all that is?”
“Better than what you’re contemplating,” she said. “I see through the glass darkly to the other side.”
“You don’t love me,” Harry declared. “No woman who loved a man could say this.”
“You’re right,” she said, shaking. “Io non ti amo.”
Stunned, he sat and watched her turn away from him, her face covered.
Grabbing her arms, he squeezed them, shook her wrists, shook her, took her wet face into his hands. “It’s too late for this grievous wrong,” he said, pressing her to him. “You knew what you were doing, like gunpowder setting yourself off inside my heart, you knew it when you danced naked into my revolution. Well, this is wha
t revolution looks like, Gina. It’s violent. It destroys things in its path. It eats its own children. It makes the same mistakes as the generation before it. It wastes, and profligates and breaks apart the things that were whole. That is what a revolution is. That is what revolutionaries do. After you’ve taken my whole heart, you can’t tell me this isn’t what you want. You can’t unstorm the Bastille. You can’t uncross the Rubicon, you can’t disarm the Colonials. This is your path to freedom. Me. Now get up and walk it.”
“No,” she said, barely audible from weakness.
“Walk it,” he said, pressing his fingertips into her shoulder blades, “or throw yourself from the fucking bridge.”
“I will not prove my love for you with false choices or false miracles,” she whispered.
“You just told me you didn’t love me,” he said. “You told me you want me to marry someone else.”
He released her then, let her go.
“Is this what you meant,” she whispered, “when you called it ‘violent’ catastrophe?”
He sat there mute. “That’s not what I called it,” he said at last. But that’s what it was.
“I am yours, through and through.” She was barely audible through her swollen mouth. “I always was. You never asked me, because you didn’t want to know, but know this—everything in my American life I did for you. Everything. If you only knew a quarter of the truth.”
She curled herself into a ball, her back to him. He drove her home, and when they stopped in front of the gate to the residence halls, nearly closed for midnight curfew, she didn’t speak, just stumbled out of his car and staggered onward.
He tipped his hat as he watched her go, blowing her a kiss, wishing for the high bridge himself, for instant oblivion.
Chapter Seventeen
THE MARBLE FAUN
1
“DARLING, I picked out two hymns, but I thought you could select a couple yourself and we’d narrow it to your favorite and my favorite?”
“What hymns?” They were standing inside the Algonquin Club ballroom looking at the arrangements of tables. Rather, Alice was looking. Harry was there in body only.
“Yes. I don’t know what your favorites are.”