Two
ON THE TRAIN BACK, Gina thought about Salvo’s words. She didn’t think Harry would interpret her lateness as faithlessness. He wasn’t that kind.
Her hands were on the cold glass, her palms. The train was stopped in the well, waiting for a signal.
They tried hard to make the best of it. Did Gina ever complain? How could she complain when she had been given what her heart wanted most. You’d have to be an ingrate to complain after that, wouldn’t you?
Mill workers were being laid off left and right, though it was nearing the holidays. Gina was lucky to have her job. Talent and style, Angela had said to her with approval. But how much style did Gina need to work in the mending room? She wore white to work, she didn’t dye wool anymore. She worked with ladies at a table, dressed in a skirt in a room full of windows.
Then why did she sometimes wish the buildings would burn to the ground?
Once, in 1886, there had been a fire. Why did she recall that wistfully?
So many blessings. She sewed handmade costumes, walked in city parades, dressed the nurses, supported their floats.
She worked on Mill Island, but she wasn’t a carpenter, wasn’t a machinist. Her long curly hair didn’t get tangled in heavy equipment. She wasn’t hospitalized for months with a near-fatal injury like her friend Pamela.
She wasn’t a child anymore. The child labor laws no longer applied to her.
Many things no longer applied to her.
For a time Gina had worked at Duck Mill, making cloth out of specialty cotton called canvas that was also used to make sails. Tonight on the train it came back to her. Making a sail. For a boat on the ocean. Having the wind take her away. In any direction. She dreamed about the sails as she spun the cotton. She worked blazing fast, as always, but dreamed languidly of warm water and boats and the wind grabbing hold of her with the sail up. Well, why not? Harry was such a dreamer. It’s one of the things she loved most about him. Why shouldn’t she allow herself a dream or two? What, only the young and the (formerly) wealthy were allowed to dream?
Things hadn’t quite turned out as she thought they might, planned they would, dreamed they could. It was cold on the train. Like in their house. She closed the coat tighter around herself, breathed into her woolen scarf, curved into a ball.
For one, she truly had believed in her Italian, family-centered heart that after a few months Harry would make amends with his family.
They had spent the summer after they were married at her mother’s house in Lawrence while they figured things out. She continued to work with Salvo in his restaurants. A few nights a week she helped out at St. Vincent de Paul’s mending their donations. She had intended to return to Simmons College in the fall to finish her degree. She expected to move to Cambridge when Harry started teaching at Harvard again and to commute to classes from there.
It took him until the morning she was rushing off to register for her fall semester to show her the letter from the head of the economics department terminating Harry’s relationship with Harvard University.
He said he didn’t have all the answers. She hoped he had some. He had been reading so much, out on the porch in a rocking chair, his nose always buried inside one thick educational tome or another. Surely he could have read a morsel that would solve just one of their problems. But he couldn’t solve her senior year in Simmons.
“What do you propose we do?” he had said. “Live apart? I live here with your mother, brother, cousin, while you live on campus close to Archer?” Archer was a boy who had liked Gina.
She suggested they both move to Boston.
“What would we live on? Your bookstore salary?”
Gina didn’t know what to say. She cocked her head this way, that, looked out on to Summer Street, chewed her lip. “You could, oh, get a job.”
“Doing what?”
Gina wanted to point out the sewing machine, the looms, St. Vincent’s, St. Mary’s, Salvo’s restaurants, the houses Mimoo cleaned, the quarries, the lumber yards, the printing presses, the textile mills. She wanted to gently remind Harry of his black contempt for indolent Dyson, a boy proud of his desire to work only five hours a day. She wanted to tell him that Canney’s, the basket-weaving factory, was hiring. She didn’t say any of these things. Because you couldn’t say them to a descendant of one of the Founding Fathers, an aristocrat. “How are we going to live?”
He shrugged and she saw in his face that he didn’t have a plan. “I’ll figure it out. This is new for me, uncharted. Give me time.”
She stood in front of him in her smart coat and hat, her walkabout shoes. She had her green purse in her hands, that’s how close she had been to going to the train station to catch the 9:45 to Boston to register for senior fall. Slowly she put down her purse and untied the ribbons of her hat.
That was six years ago.
“I was going to become even more politically active on campus,” Gina told him when she still told him things. “I was going to form a club to advocate for women’s suffrage. Perhaps other rights too. Advocate for women to be allowed to attend Harvard University one day. Maybe even teach there.”
“Women teach at Harvard?” Harry laughed. “What are you saying? That’s not a right, that’s folly.”
“I wanted to get my masters.”
“I wanted things too,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “They’re sitting in front of you in a skirt and blouse.”
“Indeed.” The verbal conversation ended and another conversation, less verbal but no less intense began.
“I’ve already worked in Salvo’s restaurant, Harry,” she said, picking up the topic of work a few days, weeks, years later. “I kept books, hired and fired, hosted. Washed dishes. Made pizza. I did all that.”
“So now you want me to take a job even you don’t want?”
“You want to continue living with my mother?”
“You know I don’t,” Harry said quietly, in the little bedroom they shared, with her Shaker nightstand and dresser, her narrow wooden bed. “You’re too quiet in your mother’s house. As if you’re afraid she’ll hear us.”
“I am afraid she’ll hear us.”
After they had tried hard to make sure Mimoo didn’t hear them, Gina tried again. “We both want it, we have to find our own place, darling.”
“Well, we can’t find our own place,” Harry said, “without money.”
She hung her head. “Not money,” she said. “Work. We can’t find it without work.”
He stared at her blankly. “That’s what I said.”
“No. You said …”
“What’s
