Harvesting the Heart (11 page)

“They said congratulations,” Nicholas told me when he'd hung up the phone after telling his parents about us. “They want us to come out tomorrow night.”

It was clear to me after our first visit that Astrid Prescott liked me about as much as she'd like a Hessian army overrunning her darkroom. “They did not say that,” I answered. “Tell me the truth.”

“That is the truth,” Nicholas admitted, “and that's what bothers me.”

We drove to Brookline in near silence, and when we rang the doorbell Astrid and Robert Prescott answered together. They were dressed fashionably in shades of gray, and they had dimmed the lights in the house. If I had not known better, I would have assumed I'd arrived at a wake.

During dinner, I kept waiting for something to happen. When Nicholas dropped his fork, I jumped out of my seat. But there was no screaming, no earth-shattering announcement. A maid served roast duck and fiddleheads; Nicholas and his father talked about bluefishing off the Cape. Astrid toasted our future, and we all lifted our glasses so that the sun, still coming through the windows, splintered through the twisted stems and littered the walls with rainbows. I spent the main course being choked by the fear of the unknown, which lurked in the corners of the dining room with the stale breath and slitted eyes of a wolf. I spent dessert staring at the massive crystal chandelier balanced above the lily centerpiece. It was suspended by a thin gold chain, light as the hair of a fairy-tale princess, and I wondered just what it could take before it broke.

Robert led us into the parlor for coffee and brandy. Astrid made sure we all had a glass. Nicholas sat beside me on a love seat and put his arm over my shoulders. He leaned over and whispered to me that dinner had gone so well he wouldn't be surprised if his parents now offered us a huge, extravagant wedding. I knotted my hands in my lap, noticing the small framed photos tucked in every spare inch of space in the parlor—in the bookshelves, on the piano, even beneath the chairs. All were photos of Nicholas, at different ages: Nicholas on a tricycle, Nicholas's face turned up to the sky, Nicholas sitting on the front steps with a ratty black puppy. I was trying so hard to see these pieces of his life, the things I had missed, that I almost did not hear Robert Prescott's question. “Just how old,” he said, “are you
really.”

I was caught off guard. I had been examining the ice-blue satin paper on the walls, the overstuffed white wing chairs, and the Queen Anne side tables, tastefully highlighted with antique vases and painted copper boxes. Nicholas had told me that the portrait over the fireplace, a Sargent which had held my interest, was not anyone he knew. It wasn't the subject that had led his father to purchase it, he said; it was the investment. I wondered how Astrid Prescott had found the time to create a name for herself and a house that could put a museum to shame. I wondered how a boy could possibly grow up in a home where sliding down the banister or walking the dog on a yo- yo could unintentionally destroy hundreds of years of history.

“I'm eighteen,” I said evenly, thinking that in my house—
our
house—furniture would be soft, with curved edges, colored bright to remind you you were alive, and everything,
everything,
would be replaceable.

“You know, Paige,” Astrid said, “eighteen is such an age. Why, I didn't know what I really wanted to do with my life until I was at least thirty-two.”

Robert stood and paced in front of the fireplace. He stopped directly in the middle, blocking the face of the Sargent so that from where I sat it seemed he was the painting's center, hideously larger than life. “What my wife is trying to say is that of course you two have the right to decide what you'd like—”

“We already have,” Nicholas pointed out.

“If you please,” Robert said, “just hear me out. You certainly have the right to decide what you'd like out of life. But I wonder if perhaps your thoughts have been clouded by faulty judgment. Now, Paige, you've barely even lived. And Nicholas, you're still in school. You can't support yourself yet, much less a family, and that's to say nothing of the hours you'll spend doing your residency.” He came to stand in front of me and placed his hand, cold, on my shoulder. “Surely Paige would prefer more than the shadow of a husband.”

“Paige needs time to discover herself,” Astrid said, as if I were not in the room. “I know, believe me, that it's virtually impossible to sustain a marriage when—”

“Mother,” Nicholas interrupted. His lips were pressed together in a thin white gash. “Cut to the chase,” he said.

“Your mother and I think you ought to wait,” Robert Prescott said. “If you still feel the same way in a few years, well, of course you'll have our blessing.”

Nicholas stood up. He was two inches taller than his father, and when I saw him like that my breath caught in my throat. “We're getting married now,” he said.

Astrid cleared her throat and hit her diamond wedding band against the rim of her glass. “This is so difficult to bring up,” she said. She looked away from us, this woman who had journeyed into the Australian bush, who, armed only with a camera, had faced Bengal tigers, who had slept in the desert beneath saguaros, searching out the perfect sunrise. She looked away, and all of a sudden she changed from the mythic photographer to the shadow of an aging debutante. She looked away, and that was when I knew what she was going to say.

Nicholas stared past his mother. “Paige is not pregnant,” he said, and when Astrid sighed and sank back in the chair, Nicholas flinched as if he had fielded a blow.

Robert turned his back on his son and put his brandy snifter on the mantel of the fireplace. “If you marry Paige,” he said quietly, “I will withdraw financial support for your education.”

Nicholas took a step backward, and I did the only thing I could: I stood up beside him and gave him my weight to lean on. Across the room, Astrid was looking blindly out the window into the night, as though she would do anything in her power to avoid watching this scene. Robert Prescott turned around. His eyes were tired, and in the corners were the beginnings of tears. “I'm trying to keep you from ruining your life,” he said.

“Don't do me any favors,” Nicholas said, and he pulled me across the room. He led me out of the house, leaving the door wide open behind us.

When we were outside, Nicholas started to run. He ran around the side of the house into the backyard, past the white marble bird-bath, past the trellised grape arbor, deep into the cool woods that edged his parents' property. I found him sitting on a bed of dying pine needles. His knees were drawn up, and his head was bent, as if the air around him was too heavy to keep it upright. “Listen,” I said. “Maybe you need to think this through.”

It killed me to say those words, to think that Nicholas Prescott might disappear into his parents' million-dollar house and wave goodbye and leave my life what it used to be. I had come to the point where I truly did not think I could exist without Nicholas. When he was not around, I spent my time imagining him with me. I depended on him to tell me the dates of upcoming holidays, to make sure I got home from work safely, to fill my free time till I felt I would burst. It seemed so easy to blend into his life that at times I wondered if I had been anyone at all before I met him.

“I don't need to think this through,” Nicholas said. “We're getting married.”

“And I suppose Harvard is going to keep you on because you're God's gift to medicine?”

I realized after I said it that it was not phrased the way it should have been. Nicholas looked up as if I had slapped him. “I could drop out,” he said, turning the words over like he was speaking a foreign language.

But I would not spend the rest of my life married to a man who, at least a little, hated me because he never got to be what he had wanted. I didn't love Nicholas because he was going to be a doctor, but I did love him because he was, unquestionably, the best. And Nicholas wouldn't have been Nicholas if he had to compromise. “Maybe there's a dean you can talk to,” I said softly. “Not everyone at Harvard is made of money. They've got to have scholarships and student aid. And next year, between your salary as a resident and mine at Mercy, we could make ends meet. I could get a second job. We could take out a loan based on your future income.”

Nicholas pulled me down beside him on the pine needles and held me. In the distance I heard a blue jay trill. Nicholas had taught me, a city girl, these things: the differences between the songs of blue jays and starlings, the way to start a fire with birch bark, the humming sound of a faraway flock of geese. I felt Nicholas's chest shake with every breath. I made a mental list of the people we would have to contact tomorrow to figure out our finances, but I felt confident. I could put off my own future for a while; after all, art school would always be there, and you could very well be an artist without ever having attended one. Besides, some part of me believed that I was getting something just as good. Nicholas loved me; Nicholas had chosen to stay with me. “I will work for you,” I whispered to him, and even as I said it I had the dark thought of the Old Testament, of Jacob, who labored seven years for Rachel and still did not get what he wanted.

“I'd like to make a collect call,” I told the operator. I was whispering although Nicholas was nowhere nearby. We were supposed to meet at the office of the justice of the peace in twenty minutes, but I told him I had to run an errand for Lionel. I was trying not to touch the grimy glass of the booth with my good pink suit. I tapped the edge of the pay phone with my finger. “Say it's Paige.”

It took ten rings, and the operator was just suggesting I try again later, when my father picked up. “Hello,” he said, and his voice reminded me of his cigarettes, True, and their cool gray package.

“Collect call from Paige. Do you accept?”

“Yes,” my father said. “Oh, sure, yes.” He waited a second, I suppose to be certain the operator got off the line, and then he called my name.

“Dad,” I told him, “I'm still in Massachusetts.”

“I knew you'd be callin' me, lass,” my father said. “I've been thinkin' about you today.”

My hope jumped at that. If I didn't listen too closely, I could almost ignore the thickness wrapped around his words. Maybe Nicholas and I would visit him. Maybe one day he would visit me.

“I found a photo of you this mornin‘, stuck behind my router. D'you remember the time I took you to that pettin' zoo?” I did, but I wanted to hear him talk. I hadn't realized until then how much I missed my father's voice. “You were so lookin' forward to seein' the sheep,” he said, “the wee lambs, because I'd told you about the farm in County Donegal. You couldn'a been more than six, I figure.”

“Oh, I know the photo,” I exclaimed, suddenly remembering the image of myself hugging the fleece of a dun-colored lamb.

“I'd be surprised if you didn't,” my father said. “The way you got the wind knocked out of you that day! You went into that pen as brave as Cuchulainn himself with a palm full of feed, and every llama and goat and sheep in the place came runnin' over to you. Knocked you flat on your back, they did.”

I frowned, remembering it as though it were yesterday. They had come from all sides like nightmares, with their hollow, dead eyes and their curved yellow teeth. There had been no way out; the world had closed in around me. Now, under my wedding suit, I broke out in a light sweat; I thought how much I felt like that, again, today.