Harvesting the Heart (3 page)

My
father was born in Ireland and spent most of his life trying to
escape the stigmas attached. He wasn't embarrassed to be Irish—
in fact, it was the crowning glory of his life; he was just
embarrassed to be an Irish
immigrant.
When
he was eighteen he'd moved from Bridgeport, the Irish section of
Chicago, to a small neighborhood off Taylor Street made up mostly of
Italians. He never drank. For a time, he tried, unsuccessfully, to
cultivate a midwestern twang. But religion for my father was not
something you had a choice about. He believed with the zealousness of
an evangelist, as if spirituality were something that ran through
your veins and not through your mind. I have wondered if, had it
not been for my mother, he would have chosen to be a priest.

My
father always believed that America was just a temporary stop on his
way back to Ireland, although he never let us know how long he
planned on staying. His parents had brought him over to Chicago when
he was just five, and although he was really city bred, he had never
put the farm country of County Donegal out of his mind. I always
questioned how much was memory and how much was imagination, but
I was swept away anyway by my father's stories. The year my mother
left, he taught me how to read, using simple primers based on Irish
mythology. While other little kids knew of Bert and Ernie and Dick
and Jane, I learned about Cuchulainn, the famous Irish hero, and his
adventures. I read about Saint Patrick, who rid the island of snakes;
Donn, the God of the Dead, who gave souls their directions to the
underworld; the Basilisk, whose stale, killing breath I hid from at
night beneath my covers.

My
father's favorite story was about Oisin, the son of Finn Mac Cool. He
was a legendary warrior and poet who fell in love with Niamh, a
daughter of the sea god. They lived happily for several years on a
jewel of an ocean island, but Oisin could not get thoughts of his
homeland out of his mind.
Ireland,
my
father used to say,
keeps
runnin' through your blood.
When
Oisin told his wife he wanted to return, she loaned him a magic
horse, warning him not to dismount because three hundred years had
passed. But Oisin fell from the horse and turned into a very old man.
And still, Saint Patrick was there to welcome him, just like, my
father said, he would one day welcome the three—and then the
two—of us.

For
the balance of my life after my mother left, my father tried to raise
me in the best way he knew. That meant parochial school, and
confession every Saturday, and a picture of Jesus on the Cross, which
hung over my bed like a talisman. He did not see the contradictions
in Catholicism. Father Draher had told us to love thy neighbor
but not to trust the Jews. Sister Evangeline preached to us about
having impure thoughts, and yet we all knew that she'd been a
married man's mistress for fifteen years before entering the
convent. And of course there was confession, which said you could do
whatever you wanted but always come away clean after a few Hail Marys
and Our Fathers. I had believed this for quite some time, but I came
to know, firsthand, that there were certain marks on your soul that
no one could ever erase.

My
favorite place in all Chicago was my father's workshop. It was dusty
and smelled of wood shavings and airplane glue, and in it were
treasures like old coffee grinders and rusted hinges and purple Hula
Hoops. In the evenings and on rainy Saturday afternoons, Daddy would
disappear into the basement and work until it was dark. Sometimes
I felt as if I were the parent, hauling him upstairs and telling him
he really had to eat something. He would work on his latest
inventions while I sat off to the side on a musty green sofa and did
my homework.

My
father turned into a different person in his workshop. He moved with
the grace of a cat; he pulled parts and wheels and cogs out of the
air like a magician, to make gadgets and knickknacks where minutes
before there was nothing. When he spoke of my mother, which was not
often, it was always down in the workshop. Sometimes I would catch
him staring up at the nearest window, a small cracked rectangle. The
light would fall on his face in a way that made him seem ages older
than he was; and I'd have to stop myself and count the years and
wonder how much time really had gone by.

It
wasn't as if my father actually ever said to me, I
know
what you did.
He
just stopped speaking to me. And it was then that I knew. He acted
anxious and he wanted time to pass quickly so I could leave for
college. I thought about something a girl in my PE class had said
once about having sex: that once you did it, everyone could tell. Was
the same true of abortions? Could my father read it on my face?

I
waited one week after the fact, hoping that graduation would bring
about some kind of understanding. But my father suffered through the
ceremony and never even said "Congratulations!" to me. That
day, he moved in and out of the shadows of our house like someone
uncomfortable in his own skin. At eleven o'clock, we watched the
nightly news. The headline story was about a woman who had bludgeoned
her three-month-old infant with a can of salmon. The woman was taken
to a psychiatric hospital. Her husband kept telling reporters he
should have seen it coming.

When
the news was over, my father went to his old cherry desk and took a
.blue velvet box from the top drawer. I smiled. "I thought you'd
forgotten," I said.

He
shook his head and watched with guarded eyes as I ran my lingers over
the smooth cover, hoping for pearls or emeralds. Inside were rosary
beads, beautifully carved out of rosewood. "I thought," he
said quietly, "you might be needing these."

I
told myself that night as I packed that I was doing this because I
loved him and I didn't want him to bear my sins for the rest of his
life. I packed only my functional clothes, and I wore my school
uniform because I figured it would help me blend in. Technically
I was not running away. I was eighteen. I could come and go as I
pleased.

I
spent my last three hours at home downstairs in my father's workshop,
trying out different wordings for the note I would leave behind. I
ran my fingers over his newest project. It was a birthday card that
sang a little ditty when you opened it and then, when you pressed the
corner, automatically inflated itself into a balloon. He said there
was really a market for this stuff. My father was having trouble with
the music. He didn't know what would happen to the microchip once the
thing became a balloon. "Seems to me," he'd said just the
day before, "once you've got something, it shouldn't go changing
into something else."

In
the end, I simply wrote: I
love
you. I'm sorry. I'll be fine.
When
I looked at it again, I wondered if it made sense. Was I sorry for
loving him? Or because I'd be fine? Finally, I threw down the pen. I
believed I was being responsible, and I knew that eventually I would
tell him where I'd wound up. The next morning I took the rosary beads
to a pawnshop in the city. With half my money, I bought a bus ticket
that would take me as far away from Chicago as it could. I tried very
hard to make myself believe there was nothing for me to hold on to
there.

On
the bus I made up aliases for myself and told them to anyone who
asked. I decided at a rest stop in Ohio th?t I would get off the bus
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was close enough to Rhode Island;
it sounded more anonymous than Boston; and also, the name just made
me
feel
good—it
reminded me of dark English sweaters and graduating scholars and
other fine things. I would stay there long enough to make money that
would pay my way to RISD. Just because Fate had thrown another
obstacle in my way didn't mean I had to give up my dreams. I fell
asleep and dreamed of the Virgin Mary and wondered how she knew to
trust the Holy Spirit when he came to her, and when I woke up I heard
a single violin, which seemed to me the voice of an angel.

I
called my father from the underground pay phone in the Brattle Square
bus station. I called collect. I watched a bald old woman knitting on
a squat bench and a cellist with tinsel braided into her cornrows. I
tried to read the sausage-link graffiti on the far wall, and that's
when the connection came through. "Listen," I said, before
my father had the chance to draw a breath, "I'm never coming
home."

I
waited for him to fight me on that point, or even to break down and
admit he'd been frantically searching the streets of Chicago for two
days. But my father only let out a low whistle. "Never say
never, lass," he said. "It comes back to haunt you."

I
gripped the receiver until my knuckles turned white. My father, the
one—the
only—
person
in my life who cared what would happen to me, didn't seem very
concerned. Sure, I'd disappointed him, but that couldn't erase
eighteen years, could it? One of the reasons I'd had the courage to
leave was that, deep down, I knew he would always be there waiting; I
knew I would not really be alone.

I
shivered, wondering how I had misjudged
him
too.
I wondered what else there was to say.

"Maybe
you could tell me where you've gone off to," my father said
calmly. "I know you made it to the bus station, but after that
I'm a bit fuzzy on details."

"How
did you find that out?" I gasped.

My
father laughed, a sound that wrapped all the way around me. His
laugh, I think, was my very first memory. "I love you," he
said. "What did you expect?"

"I'm
in Massachusetts," I told him, feeling better by the minute.
"But that's all I'm going to say." The cellist picked up
her bow and drew it across her instrument's belly. "I don't know
about college," I said.

My
father sighed. "That's no reason to up an' leave," he
murmured. "You could have come to me. There's always—"
At that moment a bus whizzed by, drowning out the rest of his words.
I could not hear, and I liked that. It was easier than admitting I
did not want to know what my father was saying.

"Paige?"
my father asked, a question I had missed.

"Dad,"
I said, "did you call the police? Does anybody know?"

"I
didn't tell a soul," he said. "I thought of it, you know,
but I believed you'd come through that door any minute. I
hoped."
His
voice fell low, dull. "Truth is, I didn't believe that you'd
go."

"This
isn't about you," I pleaded. "You've got to know that it
isn't about you."

"It
is, Paige. Or you wouldn't ever ha' thought to leave."

No,
I
wanted to tell him,
that
can't be true. That can't be true, because all these years you've
been saying it wasn't my fault that
she
left.
That can't be true, because you are the one thing that I hated
leaving behind.
The
words lodged in my throat, stuck somewhere behind the tears that
started running down my face. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. "Maybe
I will come home someday," I said.

My
father tapped his finger against the end of the receiver, just as he
used to do when I was very little and he went on overnight trips to
peddle his inventions. He'd send a soft
whap
through
the phone lines.
Did
you hear that?
he'd
whisper.
That's
the sound of a kiss runnin' into your heart.