Bellagrand: A Novel by Paullina Simons

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 of being in the thick of her bed, Harry was once again in the thick of trouble. And the silk strike in Paterson was violent and unending and destined for