No one knew what had happened. In the commotion, shots ringing out, Angela was dragged inside a shop, everyone thought for safety. The police opened fire, fearing they had been fired upon. Perhaps she had already been shot before she was pulled inside the grocery store. No one could say for certain, but when the crowd had dispersed, Angela’s blood flowed in the streets and Arturo and Joe had been arrested. They had been nowhere near Essex Street, nowhere near Angela. But because they were Wobblies, they were charged with conspiracy to incite a riot—in other words with a felony that resulted in a woman’s death. That was murder. If convicted they faced execution.
No one saw Angela get hit or fall. No one heard the shot that pierced her heart. There were dozens of injured people on the ground, but only one of them lay dead, shot through the chest. Angela was twenty-eight years old, though all the papers later said Annie LoPizo was thirty, not knowing that Angela Tartaro had long ago lied about her age when she first came to America from Sicily so she could get the job that eventually claimed her life.
Angela’s life wasn’t the only one claimed. For days blood seeped out onto the starched white sheets of Gina’s bed.
Bill kept the strike going as long as he could, but a few weeks after Angela’s death, it ended. It took sixty-three days, fifty thousand women, one dead woman and one lost baby. American Woolen agreed to all the demands, and the women returned to work without a contract in mid-March.
Everybody but Angela.
Eight
JOE AND ARTURO WERE held without bail. Because Harry was not a member of the IWW, he was charged with a lesser crime of assault and destruction of private property. Bail was set against him, bail that no one could pay.
It took Gina a little while to get herself together to go see Harry in the Lawrence city jail. She couldn’t face him. She finally went because she dreaded the questions he might otherwise ask. What took you so long to get here? You’re my wife, why didn’t you come?
He said nothing. He couldn’t look at her. He didn’t reach for her across the table, he didn’t speak to her, offered no words of comfort or remonstration. He just sat, and she sat. She was too afraid she would cry so she held her tongue and kept her mouth shut. His inscrutable gray eyes were focused on anything but her.
“Are you all right?” he finally said. His voice was raspy.
Shrugging, she nodded, but didn’t trust her voice.
“Can I get out?”
“I don’t know how,” she said. “We don’t have the money for bail.”
“Can we collect some? It’s just a loan.”
“It’s five hundred dollars, Harry.”
“It’s temporary. Just get me out of here.”
“How do you propose I do this?” She squeezed her hands together.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t want to be in jail. I can’t stay in jail.”
“Harry, please can you call your father?”
His gray eyes froze over. He blinked in judgment. “No.” He stood up.
“Harry, please. He can help you. He will help you.”
“I went to him once, when he called in the money he had lent to your brother. Do you remember how he treated me?”
“But what if you get convicted? What if you go to prison?”
“I’ll rot before I ever ask him for a single thing.”
Gina did not understand. “Mimoo is right,” she said. “What father would turn away a son in such trouble?”
“Herman Barrington, that’s who. I see, so you refuse to get me out? When is my trial?”
“In the fall. And I don’t refuse—”
“What month is it now?”
“March.”
“March! Gina!”
“What would you like me to do, Harry?” She paused. “Perhaps Big Bill can help you, lend you what you need? Surely he can help. You’re here because of him.”
“I don’t think he sees it that way.”
“Really? Big Bill is the one you trust to interpret visual stimuli?”
“Very good, why don’t you try your ad hominem tack on him. I don’t see how it could fail.”
They didn’t and couldn’t speak about the unspeakable. They quarreled about only what could be quarreled about.
Right before time was up, they stared at each other mutely, hiding behind the veil of their blank eyes and cold words.
“Why didn’t you stay under the table, like I told you?” he finally asked.
“I did. The table fell. The tent fell. I fell.”
“Why did you go there at all? I told you not to go to Essex Street.”
“Your all-seeing boss commanded me to. What choice did I have? I tried to find you. Maybe if you had listened to me and stayed away from that man …”
Harry stood up abruptly. “Are we done? I guess so.”
“You wouldn’t be in jail, is how I wanted to finish,” finished Gina.
“Yes, of course that’s how you wanted to finish.”
“Would you like me to call him for you? Ask him for five hundred dollars?”
“No, Gina.”
She stood up too. “I didn’t think so. I guess I’ll see you next Sunday.”
At his arraignment, Harry went before a judge and said he was not a paying member of the IWW but would join as soon as he was freed. The judge said, “Well, then, Mr. Barrington, we had better make sure you don’t go free.”
Elston Purdy, the lousy public defender assigned to Harry, though overworked and indifferent, was sharp enough to question why bail had been set so uncommonly high. It seemed unduly punitive, Purdy said to the judge. It took a while to get a straight answer. Bail was set high, the judge finally admitted, because Harry was Herman Barrington’s son. The customary low bail wasn’t the impediment to the likes of the Barringtons that it was to the ordinary folk of Lawrence, who couldn’t raise fifty dollars, much less ten times that. The public defender proceeded to successfully argue that a son should not be penalized for the inaccessible wealth of his estranged father. That fell under cruel and unusual detainment. “It’s like setting bail high because John Paul Getty is a wealthy man, your Honor. My client and his father have not spoken to each other in seven years. He has no more right to Herman Barrington’s accounts than he does to Mr. Getty’s is what I’m trying to say.”
The judge considered the motion for two days.
Harry was released without any bail at all, on his own recognizance.
At the end of September, despite Gina’s volcanic imprecations, Harry marched in support of Joe and Arturo. “They’re being railroaded, Gina, and you know it. The charges against them are bogus. They’re now being implicated in the planting of those undetonated bombs found at Wood Mill. You know they weren’t involved in that. They’re being set up. I won’t stand for it. And you shouldn’t either. They’re our friends.”
“Angela is dead,” Gina said. “They’re not my friends.”
There were