Why? Why do you go to hospitals I am the benefactor of, libraries to which I donate books, churches to which I give alms? What is the profit in it for you? Do you think that if you do this, I will hate you less?”
Gina shook her head, nodded her head, stupefied, shamed.
“Do you do it for some twisted sense of penance? Like if you feed the poor the food I buy them, you won’t be as contemptible in God’s eyes?”
“Maybe that,” whispered Gina inaudibly.
Alice’s voice was strong. She hardly blinked, her blue-eyed stare condemning and unafraid. “You’re wasting your time. Nothing is going to make me hate him less or hate you less. Nothing. You tell him that. Nothing you will ever do will change what you did.”
To this Gina could respond. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“He never even came to tell me he wasn’t going to marry me. The flowers were being carried into the church when I found out about you and him.”
“Please forgive us.”
Alice leaned in before she left to catch up with Esther. “You think God could ever bless a union that began in such dishonor?” She laughed. “Esther is right. Please,” she added, turning her back on Gina, “make sure we never see you again.”
That’s when Gina stopped visiting Verity, going to demonstrations, working at soup kitchens and hospitals. No more parade grounds, or parks, or dreams of boat rides in spring on the Charles.
Her beloved Boston relegated to the stuff of nightmares, she stayed in Lawrence and willed herself not to think about the past, the future, the present. Not to think about anything as she waited out the black doom of Alice’s words. She prayed Alice was wrong, she hoped Alice was wrong, she believed Alice was wrong.
Until the Bread and Roses strike.
Two
IN MID-SPRING OF 1913, Gina took a train and a bus to the Wayside in Concord to see her old friend and mentor Rose Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s youngest daughter was devoting the last half of her life to ministering after the needy and desperate, and Gina desperately needed to be ministered to. She knew Rose back from her high school days when she and other students from Notre Dame had traveled to Salem and Concord to work for Rose’s Home for the Sick as part of their Sodality service.
“Child, I’m so happy to see you,” Rose said smiling, diminutive but solid, dressed as always in a nun’s habit. “I haven’t seen you since the night many years ago that you came to introduce to me your intended betrothed. How is Harry?”
For many minutes Gina sat in the chair in the front hall and wept into Rose’s sleeve. Rose, full of compassion, said nothing. She didn’t need to. Only her palm that patted Gina’s back spoke. There, there, the palm said. There, there. “Come with me to the kitchen. I’ll make you some tea. You’ll have to walk past the beds of the terminally sick. You won’t mind, will you?”
“I lost my baby, Rose,” Gina said when they sat down at the kitchen table.
“God keep you. I’m sorry. I know it’s a terrible pain.”
Gina nodded, thinking those were just words from Rose. For what did Rose know of this pain?
Rose with her kind and round face leaned over and whispered, “I know what it is to lose a soul you love. As your husband lost his mother, I lost my beloved father at thirteen. He was too young to die.”
“Mine too, mine too. I lost my father at fifteen,” said Gina. “I miss him every day.”
“As your husband misses his mother?”
“I can’t say. He never speaks of her.”
“Still waters run deep, my child.”
Gina wiped her face, pulled herself up in her chair.
“First my father,” said Rose, “then my sister, then my mother. And then my husband. Yes, Gina, I had a husband. I lost him”—she continued—“because he couldn’t bear the grief we both shared.” She paused. “The grief of losing our four-year-old boy to the diphtheria that took him as suddenly as he had appeared in our life.”
Now it was Gina’s hand that reached out to pat Rose’s black vestments. Was that presumptuous? There, there. So she did know everything.
“I suffered as you suffer,” Rose said. “All possibilities were extinguished with Frankie’s last breath.”
“That’s exactly what I feel,” whispered Gina.
“Except you’re still young, you can have another baby, with the blessing of the Lord. I was nearly forty. I couldn’t. My poor George, he was just bent in half by it. He took to drink to drown himself, and soon the drink obliged.” Tears came to Rose’s eyes and she made a clucking sound, crossing herself with a shudder. “Whatever you do, my girl, keep yourself away from the liquid sorrows. They have a way of swallowing up everything, like the highest tides.”
“Don’t worry about me on that score,” Gina said. “I don’t have a taste for it.” They sat. “Rose, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I came because I don’t know how to help myself anymore. Or my husband.”
“That’s how I was, too,” Rose said. “But then I opened a home for dying, cast-out women. I got busy with other people’s suffering. Sometimes, during the day, it helps me forget.”
“Yes,” Gina said. “You think that’s what I should do? Open a home for the dying?”
Rose chuckled. “No. But tell me, how is Harry? He must also be struggling terribly through the loss of your baby.”
Gina clenched her fists, unclenched them, folded them into a prayer.
“We never speak of it.” She lifted her hand to stop Rose from repeating herself. “There’s been … I don’t know how to put it … a divvying up of blame.”
“He blames you?”
“I think he might.”
“Do you blame him?”
She didn’t want to lie to a nun. “I don’t not blame him.” It was like the sacrament of reconciliation coming here to talk to Rose.
Rose shook her head. “That’s a slow poison. Like rot.”
Gina hung her head. “I know. I tried to move past it.” Her mouth twisted, got tight. “But he hasn’t made it easy for me. He was just in jail for the problems during the Bread and Roses strike. Have you heard about that?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t. Sorrows are so abundant here, I have no time to read the papers.”
“I understand. Well, I thought when he was released we’d begin our life again, try again maybe … but as soon as he was released, he packed his bags and left.”
“Left you?”
“Not left me, but …” She didn’t know what to say, how to put it. “He asked me to go with him. He’s at another strike at the moment, in Paterson, New Jersey.”
“New Jersey?”
“The man who pays his salary organized that one, too.” Gina sighed. “Harry says we need the money. And we do. But I can’t leave my mother, my job. I’m lucky to have a job. So now he sends me his money, but hasn’t been home in weeks.” Her lips trembled. She didn’t want to tell Rose what Alice had said long ago that had tattooed fear into her heart because it sounded too much like the unwanted truth. Was it wrong to build a house like marriage, even a mansion like their marriage, on the ashes of someone else’s devastated heart?
The money trickled in with the mail. Instead