“Not at all,” Gina said graciously. “You could be successful. You just give them too much information.” She smiled. “It’s the education university. Shoppers don’t want to hear about swamps and mosquitoes and ships. Please sign the petition to bring exotic tropical fruit to Lawrence. That’s all you have to say. And next time you come, bring your bananas, Ben,” she added. “We’ll give away a banana with every signature.”
“I don’t think I can get four thousand bananas,” said Ben.
“Do you want the canal or not?”
What could Ben say?
“If you come next Saturday,” Gina said, “Verity and I will make a barrel of lemonade …”
“We will?” muttered Verity.
“Yes, and we will set up a little table, where on a hot August afternoon, for every signature, we’ll offer a free cup of lemonade. A banana would be good too. That’s almost a full lunch.”
The boys stood and gaped as she beamed with satisfied pleasure.
“But, Gina, we have no money to buy lemons and sugar,” whispered Verity.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get some,” Gina whispered back.
4
Four steaming August Saturdays blew by in a whirlwind, and by the end of the month, after trolley cars of bananas and barrels of lemonade, with four clipboards and some much-needed help from the humid weather, Ben had his 5,000 signatures and his heart in a mangled twist. He had already begun feebly insisting that what he needed was not 5,000 but 10,000, so he could keep on coming indefinitely to Lawrence. But on the last Saturday, Pippa, who usually didn’t venture out, was unfortunately one of the people into whose hands Ben thrust a glass of lemonade and a pen. She signed first, then she saw her cousin’s daughter, in a borrowed dress too short for her, her hair up only by the loosest of definitions, and her sleeves inexplicably three-quarter length, though no acceptable dresses were made with three-quarter sleeves anymore. Moreover, Pippa saw Gina as she really was—relaxed, laughing, the way no fifteen-year-old girl was supposed to act on the street with men many years her senior.
“I’m in trouble, you two,” Gina whispered, as Pippa’s plump, moist hand went around her forearm. “Goodbye!”
All of these conclusions about Gina’s impropriety in dress and demeanor Pippa revealed not only to Gina when they got home but to Mimoo and Salvo later that evening. She saved it, actually saved it, for when Salvo returned from the quarry.
“So this is how Verity has been looking after you?” Salvo bellowed.
“Don’t blame Verity for this! It’s nothing!”
“This is not nothing, Gina!” shouted Mimoo. “But this isn’t Verity’s fault, Salvo, it’s your sister’s! Verity is not her keeper.”
“She actually is her keeper, Mimoo! We let Gina out on Saturday afternoons because we thought she was organizing donations at the mission—with Verity!”
“We did that first,” Gina defended herself. “We did it quick. There haven’t been that many. Mostly toys. It’s not so hard, Salvo.”
“This is despicable and inappropriate.”
“What was most inappropriate,” said Pippa, fanning herself, sitting down, sweating, “was their banter, as if they were old friends!”
“Do Verity’s parents know this is what their devout Catholic daughter has been up to?” asked Mimoo.
“No one was up to anything, Mimoo!” Gina desperately didn’t want her new friend to get into trouble.
They went around like this, with Gina sticking up for Verity and pretending they were simply on a busy street in the middle of an afternoon in plain view of the whole town. No one in the house believed her, except for her mother—but only because Mimoo finally became too exhausted to fight. When Angela came home late from being out with friends, she defended Gina like a trooper, calling them all ridiculous, old-fashioned, stuck in the last century, and blowing all manner of things out of proportion.
“All right, Salvo, stop the puffery,” Gina said. “You see? I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Like Angela said. I was standing on a street corner—”
“Exactly!” yelled Salvo.
“Asking for signatures for a canal in Central America.”
“For what?”
“A canal!”
“Is that what they call it nowadays?”
“Mimoo!”
“It’s a ploy,” Salvo said. “It’s a ruse.”
“Salvo, you are crazy. Ben is going to be an engineer. He is going to build the greatest man-made wonder of the world. It’s incredible, Salvo …”
“You’re swallowing his lies hook, line and sinker, sister.”
“They’re not lies, Salvo. He’s going to build banana plantations in Costa Rica.”
“Banana plantations in Costa Rica? You said a canal in Panama?”
“How are the bananas going to get here, Mimoo?”
“Salvo is right, child,” Mimoo said. “I don’t like bananas and will not eat them.”
Gina wanted to yell in frustration at the unfairness of it all. They were pacing around the tiny living room. “Will you eat sugar?” she said, not hiding her impatience. “Coconuts? Chocolate? Ben will grow that too. And ship it here.”
“Gia, those two men are laughing at you right now,” said Salvo. “Have you looked at a map? They don’t need a canal to ship it here.”
“Now who’s the one being laughed at, Salvo?” said Gina. “They need one to ship it to Italy. To China. To France. In other words, to the rest of the world.”
“I’m not going to stand and argue with you about this,” said Salvo.
“Then why are you?”
“They’re going to have to build this canal without you, Gina Attaviano. Because no sister of mine is going to stroll the streets with two drooling men in their twenties. Do you understand?”
“You don’t understand, Salvo! They’re not drooling!” She ran to her room. What she wanted to say was they were not the ones who were drooling.
She overheard her family from the next room. The whole block overheard them. Salvo told Mimoo that Gina wasn’t allowed to see Verity anymore, but Mimoo stopped him. She pointed out to her son that Verity was studying to become a nun, that she had two devout parents who attended Mass daily, that her volunteer day job after school was collecting donations for the poor. “Is that really the kind of person your sister shouldn’t be around?”
Salvo still said yes.
“Come on, son,” said Mimoo. “It’s all right to be friendly with this Verity girl. Maybe some of her piety and love for the Lord will rub off on your sister. Maybe Verity will be a good influence.”
“Maybe,” Salvo said. How Gina regretted letting him in on her secrets in Belpasso! “But did you ever consider, Mimoo, that your daughter may not be the best influence on Verity?”
To help her learn the correct behavior, Pippa gave Gina The Young Lady’s Friend to read. Gina glanced at the first page in the slim volume of manners, checked the date of publication, and when she saw it was 1838, she promptly slapped the book shut in a huff and complained to Angela about the uselessness of learning manners from sixty years ago.
Angela tried to play mediator. “Okay. But Pippa is right. There is a proper attitude to be maintained at all times toward gentlemen.”
“Bah,” said Gina. “Actually, the real test of good manners is the proper attitude that gentlemen maintain at all times toward ladies. It’s their responsibility.”
“And yours?”
“I pretend I don’t quite know what good manners are,” Gina said with a smile. “That makes me seem impetuous and brave. I’d say I seem rather adventurous to my two new friends,” she added.
“Don’t let your brother catch you talking like that,” said Angela. “You should develop some natural modesty that will guard you against any intimation of familiarity with young men.”
“Of course, Angie. I’m going to hop to it.”
“Since breeding is something you don’t possess, then let your good taste help you in this
regard.”
Gina fell quiet. She wasn’t sure she had any of the latter either.
“You must remain at all times delicate and refined.”
“Of course, Angie.”
“I can see you don’t think much of what I’m telling you,” Angela said, “but understand that manners is the only thing that separates the plebeian from the upper classes.”
Gina frowned. “Ange,” she said, “I don’t mean to be improper, but I’m not from the upper classes. I never was. And no matter how hoity-toity I act, not sneezing in public or touching a strand of my hair, I’ll never be mistaken for an upper-class lady. Won’t my airs just seem fake and put-on?”
“Better than no airs at all,” declared Angela.
After Salvo’s unwelcome intercession, September came, though the two had nothing to do with one another. But in September, life stopped being measured by mystical Saturday afternoons of lemonade and bananas, by two boys in dapper suits and bowler hats standing with a girl on Essex Street, her serving the drinks, them collecting signatures, having fun and making jokes, being young.
Chapter Eight
THE REWARDS OF MISSION WORK
1
ELLEN Shaw came from too illustrious a family. She was the youngest by far of four daughters and one son, born to Francis and Sarah Shaw. Her grandfather had been a hard-working merchant who made enough money so his family didn’t have to. They lived off his labor on the family estate in Roxbury, Massachusetts, then sold it, divided the money and moved to New York to pursue their separate whimsies—all except Ellen’s brother Robert, who, as soon as the war broke out, joined the Union Army. When he was getting slaughtered at Fort Wagner, Ellen was barely out of diapers.
Ellen was the runt of the family in every way including the physical. She was an afterthought, was raised like an afterthought, and behaved like an afterthought. After her brother was martyred fighting the Confederates in the 54th Regiment and Josephine founded the New York Consumers’ League and campaigned for raising wages and working conditions of women in New York, Ellen decided that maybe if she was outrageous, her family might notice her. So she was most outrageous—and no one batted an eye. She rebelled against tradition the only way she knew how, by pretending she held it in contempt.
When she was barely eighteen, she became pregnant by a man in a dance club who was out on furlough and had to return to prison after the long weekend. Finally, a much-desired scandal. Ellen was left with an impossible choice. She could quickly get involved with another man and pretend the child was his, or give the baby up for adoption. She opted for neither. She left New York to spare her family the continued humiliation, moved back to Boston, rented an apartment in Back Bay and became a single mother.
After a few months she realized that single motherhood was not as romantic as she had envisioned. The baby demanded all her time without any division of labor. She wanted to go out but there was no one to leave the child with. After six months, she came home to Staten Island to drop off her son for a visit with widowed Josephine while she went up to Canada, to the Niagara Falls. It was eleven years before Ben Shaw saw his mother again.
For over a decade he was passed like a parcel among the sisters, and finally Josephine, with whom he stayed the most, had had enough and traveled up to Boston to find Ellen.
They found her living happily in a lush Back Bay house that belonged to the family of her second husband who was now deceased. It turned out he was more of a common-law husband, and she and his family had been in court for years in their attempt to force her out of their home.
Josephine may have been judgmental of her younger sister’s vagabond ways, but Ben, who had been living under strict scrutiny of his busybody aunts, took one glimpse of his mother’s free life and decided he wanted it too. Ellen tried to explain to her son that freedom came only with lack of responsibility, and the relationship between freedom and responsibility was, tragically, inversely proportional. He begged to stay with her anyway, and she finally gave in on the condition that he call her Ellen and not let any of her potential suitors know that he was her child and not her nephew.
Josephine offered to pay the rent on a new residence so that Ben wouldn’t have to pack up and move every time Ellen found herself a new beau. Ben couldn’t explain to his aunt that that was the part he found most appealing. He had been a content and smiling boy, having been raised by three loving aunts and grown up with a gaggle of cousins. Suddenly he was thrust into only-child loneliness of living among adults. But Ellen had discovered some latent maternal talents, and while hardly formidable, they were nonetheless sufficient to learn how to cook and to be home at a reasonable hour on some evenings.
Young Ben was too often left to his own devices, however, and he started to engage in behavior that bordered on and then crossed over into the illegal—which made it all the more difficult for Ellen to pretend that parenting involved little more than cooking a plate of food for a twelve-year-old three times a week.
With the situation between them spiraling out of control, one fine Saturday afternoon on State Street Ben tried to deprive a certain Herman Barrington of his wallet in full view of a constable and an astonished Harry Barrington out for a stroll with his father. Ben was promptly seized and arrested. Had it not been for Harry’s intervention, Ben Shaw surely would’ve been held in juvenile detention until he was eighteen. As it was, Harry recognized a boy shouting for help when he saw one. He was one of those boys himself.
After the unexpected death of his mother, Harry had chafed and bucked against his older sister’s control and his father’s sudden preoccupation with his business. His misgivings and abundant loneliness turned him inward to himself, and outward to books. He managed to find something to do that consumed him, but had turned him even more away from other people.
The urchin boy stealing twenty dollars from his father’s leather wallet was a revelation to Harry. He persuaded his father to drop the charges and then invited the boy over for dinner. Ben stayed overnight and returned the following weekend. And the following.
It worked out well for everyone. Ellen and the Barringtons divided custody of Ben. Ellen had him during the week so he could go to school, and on the weekends he stayed in Barrington. He had Louis set him a sleeping cot in the corner of Harry’s bedroom, refusing a room of his own. When it came time to apply to the prestigious and expensive Andover preparatory academy, Herman Barrington didn’t even need to be convinced to offer to pay. Two years later, he delighted in telling everyone that Ben was admitted to Harvard on his own merits and received a full scholarship.
“Could it be, Father,” Harry would say, “that the Harvard Admissions Board by rules of simple deduction knows my name is Barrington and you’re one of the largest contributing endowment members, while Ben’s name is Shaw, nephew of a man who just happened to be a martyr and a war hero, not to mention an honored Porcellian? Perhaps if we told them my last name was Shaw instead, I could get a scholarship also.”
For the first few years at Harvard, Ben flitted from one ephemeral passion to the next, getting excited about chemistry, economics, business, mathematics, only last year settling on engineering—while Harry, straight and narrow, was interested in nothing but philosophy and history.
“Are you majoring in philosophy to upset me, son?” Herman would sometimes ask. “Because it doesn’t.”
“Believe it or not, it has nothing to do with you, Father.”
“I don’t believe it.”
Ellen, a frequent guest at the Barrington home, upon hearing this said to Herman, “No, Herman, yours is a very good boy, but how do you explain that my son wants to build a fruit farm in Central America as a stepping stone for taking over the world, while his mother advocates demilitarized isolation?”
“Believe it or not,” Ben said, “it has nothing to do with you, Mother.”
“I also don’t believe it.”
2
“Are you coming on Thursday?” Ben asked Harry.
&n
bsp; “Coming where?” They were walking briskly across the Yard to Memorial Hall for lunch, Ben from Applied Mechanics, Harry from Ethics of Social Questions.
“To my mother’s League meeting.”
“I wasn’t planning on it, why?”
“Do you remember Verity?”
“No. But why do you answer a question with a question?” Semester had started a week ago and Harry wasn’t crazy about one of his courses with Professor Royce: Fundamental Problems of Theoretical Philosophy. He was thinking of dropping it, but Royce was good friends with his father, and Harry didn’t want it to seem as if he was dropping the class because he didn’t want Royce to make weekly reports to Herman about Harry’s progress.
“Come on. You remember.”
“All right, so what?”
“Verity is quite interested in my mother’s Anti-Imperialism.”
“Is she?”
“Why the surprise? Yes, she is. So much so that she came to Old South last week.”
Harry stopped walking. “Verity came to a League meeting?”
“In this you are precisely correct.”
Harry contemplated a moment. “Who was the guest speaker?”
“Is that important? W.E.B. Du Bois.”
“Ah.” They resumed their steady pace down the winding path. “She must be fond of him.”
“I don’t know. He’s against miscegenation laws. The League women will not invite him back. He called all the women racists.” Ben cleared his throat. “But do you know what’s more important than how Verity feels about Du Bois?”
“I can’t imagine that anything could be. Don’t dawdle at the gate, Ben, it’s not considerate. Come on, push on through.” He prodded his friend through the narrow iron opening.
“Who Verity came with.” Ben’s whole face was alight.
Harry shook his head. His hat fell off; he had to catch it. “I thought we were over this.”
“You also thought my canal obsession was a passing fancy.”
“One of those things must be true.”