Bellagrand: A Novel by Paullina Simons

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