Still … unmitigated smells and labor, constant labor. There was no time to ever think, make long-term plans, figure things out, barely even read!
“Perhaps you’d like to move to Kalamazoo, Michigan?” Harry asked Gina. “So I could work on Henry Ford’s assembly line.”
“The man will pay you five dollars a day, Harry,” Gina said. “That’s ransom for a prince.”
“Five dollars?”
“A day!”
“Florenz Ziegfeld spends three hundred dollars on stage pillows!” Harry said. “Three hundred dollars each.”
“Perhaps then you should be the one selling him these magical pillows.”
“There you go, always turning every conversation back to money.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Yes, you do.”
“You mean lack of money?”
“Whatever you want to call it.”
And just like that, another casual spousal back-and-forth turned into intemperance. No calibration ever.
Harry found a day job that lasted a week, delivering paper goods to local restaurants. He drove a small truck, picking up supplies from Weston and delivering them to Lawrence and Andover. The job ended a week before Christmas. Gina said nothing. He said nothing, but went out looking again. A few days later he returned home excited, and told her he had found work. She was still in her first trimester and throwing up all the time.
“Full-time work?” Gina tried to sound excited herself.
“Absolutely,” he said, getting the corkscrew for the celebratory red wine.
“That’s wonderful! With who?”
“Bill Haywood.”
Gina stepped back from the table at which she had been about to sit. “Big Bill Haywood?” she repeated incredulously.
“Is there another?”
She fell quiet. Bile came up in her throat.
“I already help Joe and Arturo with organization, ideas, planning. I’m always helping them with this speech and that. Now I’ll be paid for it. Better than doing it pro bono, no?”
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Gina said. “What could one-eyed Bill possibly want with you, Harry?”
“Why wouldn’t he want something to do with me?”
“What’s the job?”
“I don’t know. He needs something, I do it.”
“See, that’s the part that worries me.”
“It shouldn’t worry you.” He opened the wine and fetched two glasses. “It should make you happy.”
“Big Bill!” she exclaimed again. “You do know that he recently stood trial for blowing up a man with a bomb, right?”
“Come on, you know he wasn’t convicted.”
She shook her head, but not hard; the nausea was making it difficult to react properly. “This is a terrible omen. Why is he in town? What is he planning here? This isn’t a mining town.” Bill Haywood had been the president of the Miners Federation before it joined with the Socialists to become the Industrial Workers of the World. “The man’s had nothing but trouble with the law, and has wreaked nothing but havoc every place he’s been. Every town he goes to, someone dies, gets shot, stampeded, beaten, bombed. Every single one! He has never passed through a town without taking half a dozen scalps with him. You want to get involved with that?”
“It’s not his fault he’s hated by the police. It’s because he’s so effective. And you told me to get a job.”
“Harry,” said Gina. “There are a number of jobs I could get that might not be palatable from your perspective, if you know what I mean. If you said to me, get a job, and I came back with something less than maritally appropriate, would you be blasé about it?”
“Okay, you’re comparing Bill Haywood to Miss Camilla’s merry girls by the railroad tracks?”
“A man acquitted on a technicality for murdering another man in front of his own home is going to pay you for doing whatever he tells you?” Gina tightened her grip on the chair. “Yeah, I’d say it’s worse.”
Harry put down the wine glasses without pouring.
“Since when did you become so fastidious?” he asked coldly. “I don’t recall you turning up your nose at your radical anarchist Emma Goldman whose speeches inspired a man to assassinate a president.”
“Emma Goldman is all talk,” said Gina. “Bill Haywood is violent action. He calls it direct action. But we know what he means, don’t we?” She put her hands together in supplication. “We’re having a baby. We have to think about these fine distinctions.”
“Did you think about those distinctions as you illegally distributed Goldman’s pamphlets on birth control in felonious violation of the Comstock Act?”
“That was obviously a major failure,” she said, placing her hands on her churning and twisting abdomen. She didn’t have the stomach for a fight.
“On her part or yours?”
“On mine.”
He watched her warily for a few moments. “Don’t be upset,” he said. “We need the work. I don’t want to disappoint you. It’ll be all right. I’ll stay with Bill just until something better comes along. He gave me a small advance for Christmas. At least we’ll be all right until the new year.”
Grabbing the bottle, Gina poured the wine herself. “Better count your Advent blessings now, Bill Haywood’s flunky,” she said, raising her glass to her husband. “If I’ve read about him correctly, there’ll be precious few of them soon.”
They clinked, drank their wine. The fight always fizzled out of the both of them. Intimacy was a salve to smooth the sharpest edges.
“Big Bill thinks I’m too involved with you,” Harry said that night in bed. “He says I can’t be of help to him if my allegiance is divided.”
Gina wrapped her arms, her legs around her husband. “Did you tell him your allegiance isn’t divided at all? It is wholly to me.”
“You’re just making his point. Bill told me that great men cannot be great or become great when they are surrounded”—he groaned—“by their women.”
She did not unwrap herself. “And you believe him?”
“Right now, I can’t think straight.”
The covers went over their heads. The covers flew off their overheated bodies.
Afterward: “Can you think straight now?”
“I fear he may be right.”
Gina shook her head in exasperation, in muted affection. “Truly,” she said, “and in this case literally, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
One
FROM CHILDHOOD,