Children of Liberty. Paullina Simons

The green peasant skirt made her look untailored, yet fresh and young. She was tanned, looked happy, and walked up and down Essex Street, shouting at the passersby both in Italian and English. In three hours she collected seven hundred signatures. The boys and Verity collected eighty-four—combined.

      “You clearly have skills we can’t ever hope to attain,” Ben said with an impressed glitter, as if he needed one more thing to impress him.

      “Not at all,” Gina said graciously. “You could be successful. You just give them too much information.” She smiled. “It’s the education university. Shoppers don’t want to hear about swamps and mosquitoes and ships. Please sign the petition to bring exotic tropical fruit to Lawrence. That’s all you have to say. And next time you come, bring your bananas, Ben,” she added. “We’ll give away a banana with every signature.”

      “I don’t think I can get four thousand bananas,” said Ben.

      “Do you want the canal or not?”

      What could Ben say?

      “If you come next Saturday,” Gina said, “Verity and I will make a barrel of lemonade …”

      “We will?” muttered Verity.

      “Yes, and we will set up a little table, where on a hot August afternoon, for every signature, we’ll offer a free cup of lemonade. A banana would be good too. That’s almost a full lunch.”

      The boys stood and gaped as she beamed with satisfied pleasure.

      “But, Gina, we have no money to buy lemons and sugar,” whispered Verity.

      “Don’t worry, I’ll get some,” Gina whispered back.

       4

      Four steaming August Saturdays blew by in a whirlwind, and by the end of the month, after trolley cars of bananas and barrels of lemonade, with four clipboards and some much-needed help from the humid weather, Ben had his 5,000 signatures and his heart in a mangled twist. He had already begun feebly insisting that what he needed was not 5,000 but 10,000, so he could keep on coming indefinitely to Lawrence. But on the last Saturday, Pippa, who usually didn’t venture out, was unfortunately one of the people into whose hands Ben thrust a glass of lemonade and a pen. She signed first, then she saw her cousin’s daughter, in a borrowed dress too short for her, her hair up only by the loosest of definitions, and her sleeves inexplicably three-quarter length, though no acceptable dresses were made with three-quarter sleeves anymore. Moreover, Pippa saw Gina as she really was—relaxed, laughing, the way no fifteen-year-old girl was supposed to act on the street with men many years her senior.

      “I’m in trouble, you two,” Gina whispered, as Pippa’s plump, moist hand went around her forearm. “Goodbye!”

      All of these conclusions about Gina’s impropriety in dress and demeanor Pippa revealed not only to Gina when they got home but to Mimoo and Salvo later that evening. She saved it, actually saved it, for when Salvo returned from the quarry.

      “So this is how Verity has been looking after you?” Salvo bellowed.

      “Don’t blame Verity for this! It’s nothing!”

      “This is not nothing, Gina!” shouted Mimoo. “But this isn’t Verity’s fault, Salvo, it’s your sister’s! Verity is not her keeper.”

      “She actually is her keeper, Mimoo! We let Gina out on Saturday afternoons because we thought she was organizing donations at the mission—with Verity!”

      “We did that first,” Gina defended herself. “We did it quick. There haven’t been that many. Mostly toys. It’s not so hard, Salvo.”

      “This is despicable and inappropriate.”

      “What was most inappropriate,” said Pippa, fanning herself, sitting down, sweating, “was their banter, as if they were old friends!”

      “Do Verity’s parents know this is what their devout Catholic daughter has been up to?” asked Mimoo.

      “No one was up to anything, Mimoo!” Gina desperately didn’t want her new friend to get into trouble.

      They went around like this, with Gina sticking up for Verity and pretending they were simply on a busy street in the middle of an afternoon in plain view of the whole town. No one in the house believed her, except for her mother—but only because Mimoo finally became too exhausted to fight. When Angela came home late from being out with friends, she defended Gina like a trooper, calling them all ridiculous, old-fashioned, stuck in the last century, and blowing all manner of things out of proportion.

      “All right, Salvo, stop the puffery,” Gina said. “You see? I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Like Angela said. I was standing on a street corner—”

      “Exactly!” yelled Salvo.

      “Asking for signatures for a canal in Central America.”

      “For what?”

      “A canal!”

      “Is that what they call it nowadays?”

      “Mimoo!”

      “It’s a ploy,” Salvo said. “It’s a ruse.”

      “Salvo, you are crazy. Ben is going to be an engineer. He is going to build the greatest man-made wonder of the world. It’s incredible, Salvo …”

      “You’re swallowing his lies hook, line and sinker, sister.”

      “They’re not lies, Salvo. He’s going to build banana plantations in Costa Rica.”

      “Banana plantations in Costa Rica? You said a canal in Panama?”

      “How are the bananas going to get here, Mimoo?”

      “Salvo is right, child,” Mimoo said. “I don’t like bananas and will not eat them.”

      Gina wanted to yell in frustration at the unfairness of it all. They were pacing around the tiny living room. “Will you eat sugar?” she said, not hiding her impatience. “Coconuts? Chocolate? Ben will grow that too. And ship it here.”

      “Gia, those two men are laughing at you right now,” said Salvo. “Have you looked at a map? They don’t need a canal to ship it here.”

      “Now who’s the one being laughed at, Salvo?” said Gina. “They need one to ship it to Italy. To China. To France. In other words, to the rest of the world.”