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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 wineglasses 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.”

Chapter 2
    A NNIE L O P IZO
    One
    F ROM CHILDHOOD, GINA ALWAYS hated it when her mother was right. Now that she was an adult, she liked it even less. And what was worse was the number of things Mimoo was right about, and what was even more infuriating was the way her mother always knew it.