questions.
“Where’s the baby?”
That she knew. “With her mother.”
Salvo spat.
“You were supposed to come back by five so we could talk.”
“I got busy.”
She saw that. She was cold. “I have to run now. I’ll miss my train. I’ll come back Wednesday.”
“Come earlier. Please. I’ll lose my job if I can’t work lunch. How is Mimoo?”
Gina shrugged. “She lost another domestic job. She keeps dropping things. But Salvo …” She struggled with herself. This wasn’t the time. But it was Christmas soon. “Will you come with Mary, spend Christmas with us? Please?”
Salvo shook his head. “You know I can’t. Also her damn mother takes her.”
“Don’t talk like that about the mother of your baby.”
“Have you met the beastly creature?”
“All the same. Just … swallow your pride, Salvo. For our mother. Bring Mary. Bring Phyllis too. One day a year, on Christmas, let’s bury the hatchet.”
“You know where I’d like to bury the hatchet,” her brother said, lucid enough.
“Oh, Salvo … what are you going to do, be angry forever?”
“Per sempre.”
“Please. Mimoo cries every night. She wants to see her grandchild for Christmas.”
“Her mother has her, I told you. Her mother, who, by the way, has found herself another fool to pay her rent.” Salvo swore. “Instead of talking to me, why don’t you tell that common-law husband of yours to go visit his family for Christmas? Tell him to go spend some time with them. Or tell him to go get a fucking job. Then I’ll come.”
“He is not my common-law husband.”
“Did you get married in a church?”
“Salvo.”
“Exactly.”
“You know he can’t,” she finally said.
“Can’t get a job? What a great country this is.” Salvo laughed. “Where one can live without doing any fucking work whatsoever. Can the immigrants do this? How many generations must we toil before we’re able to do nothing but sit around the table and pretend we’re smart?”
“Stop it, Salvo, you know he’s been working. He’s trying hard. It’s not easy for him. I mean, he can’t visit his family.”
“Oh, he can’t, can he? Well, I can’t either.”
“He can’t visit them because they don’t want him. That’s the difference. They want nothing to do with him. His father made that very clear. You know that.”
Salvo sighed. His black eyes glistened. “I can never set foot in the house where that man resides.”
“The man who’s your sister’s husband?”
“Whatever you call him.” He blinked, shrugged, deflected as always. “Tell Mimoo I’m thinking of changing professions. Look at this.” He showed his sister a pipe inlaid with intricate carving. “The Battle of Bunker Hill is carved on it,” he said with incredulity. “Isn’t it fantastic? I want to be a pipe carver. I know a guy. I’m trying to get in as an apprentice.” He shook his head. “There’s an idiotic rule, though, we’re trying to get around. I have to apprentice for twenty-five years before I can become a carver. Can you imagine?”
She gazed at him fondly. “You gonna become a pipe carver, Salvo? Do you even hear yourself?”
They chuckled, they hugged. Turning her around, Salvo pointed her down the street. “Go. Quick. Or he’ll think you’re stepping out on him. Although maybe then he’ll leave you and you’ll finally be free like Papa wanted.” He stuck some bills into her hand. “Kiss Mimoo for me. Tell her it’s for Christmas. I’ll have more on Wednesday. I’m trying to get hired by the Purity Distilling Company. They make molasses here in the North End. I get a job there, I’d be set for life. Union and everything. Tell Mimoo that so she stops fretting. Now go.”
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