Harvesting the Heart (12 page)

My father was grinning; I could hear it. “What did you do?” I asked.

“What I always did,” he said, and I listened to his smile fade. “I picked you up. I came and got you.”

I listened to all the things I wanted and needed to say to him racing through my mind. In the silence I could feel him wondering why he hadn't come to get me in Massachusetts; why he hadn't picked up the pieces and smoothed it over and made it better. I could sense him running through everything we had said to each other and everything we hadn't, trying to find the thread that made this time different.

I
knew, even if he didn't. My father's God preached forgiveness, but did he?

Suddenly all I wanted to do was take away the pain. It was my sin; it was one thing for me to feel the guilt, but my father shouldn't have to. I wanted to let him know that he wasn't responsible, not for what I had done and not for me. And since he wouldn't believe I could take care of myself—
never
would, not now—I told him there was someone else to take care of me. “Dad,” I said, “I'm getting married.”

I heard a strange sound, as if I had knocked the wind out of him. “Dad,” I repeated.

“Yes.” He drew in his breath. “Do you love him?” he asked.

“Yes,” I admitted. “Actually, I do.”

“That makes it harder,” he said.

I wondered about that for a moment, and then when I felt I was going to cry, I covered the mouthpiece with my hand and closed my eyes and counted to ten. “I didn't want to leave you,” I said, the same words I spoke every time I called. “It wasn't the way I thought things would happen.”

Miles away, my father sighed. “It never is,” he said.

I thought about the easy days, when he would bathe me as a child and wrap me in my long-john pajamas and comb the tangles from my hair. I thought about sitting on his lap and watching the bluest flames in the fireplace and wondering if there was any finer thing in the world.

“Paige?” he said into the silence. “Paige?”

I did not answer all the questions he was trying to ask. “I'm getting married, and I wanted you to know,” I said, but I was certain he could hear the fear in my voice as loudly as I could hear it in his.

Nicholas brought me violets, two huge bunches, still misted and swollen with the spray of a florist. “Violets,” I said, smiling. “For faithfulness.”

“Now, how do you know that?” Nicholas said.

“That's what Ophelia says, anyway, in
Hamlet,”
I told him, taking the bunches and holding them in my left hand. I had a quick vision of the famous painting of Ophelia, where she floats faceup in a stream, dead, her hair swirled around her and tangled with flowers. Daisies, in fact. And violets.

The justice of the peace and a woman whom he introduced only as a witness were standing in the center of a plain room when we walked in. I think Nicholas had told me the man was a retired judge. He asked us to spell and pronounce our names, and then he said “Dearly beloved.” The entire thing took less than ten minutes.

I did not have a ring for Nicholas and I started to panic, but Nicholas pulled from his suit pocket two bright gold bands and handed the larger one to me. He looked at me, and I could clearly read his eyes:
I didn't forget. I won't forget anything.

chapter
5

T
he best of the several memories I have of my mother involved the betrayal of my father. It was a Sunday, which had meant for as long as I'd been alive that we would be going to Mass. Every Sunday, my mother and my father and I would put on our best outfits and walk down the street to Saint Christopher‘s, where I would listen to the rhythmic hum of prayers and watch my mother and my father receive Communion. Afterward we'd stand in the sun on the worn stone steps of the church, and my father's hand would rest warm on my head while he talked to the Morenos and the Salvuccis about the fine Chicago weather. But this particular Sunday, my father had left for O'Hare before the sun came up. He was flying to Westchester, New York, to meet with an eccentric old millionaire in hopes of promoting his latest invention, a polypropylene pool float that hung suspended by wires in the middle of the two-car garages that were part of the new suburban tract houses. He called it the Sedan Saver, and it kept car doors from scratching each other's paint when they were opened.

I was supposed to be asleep, but I had been awakened by the dreams I'd been having. At four, almost five, I didn't have many friends. Part of the problem was that I was shy; part was that other kids were steered clear of the O'Toole house by their parents. The bosomy Italian mothers in the neighborhood said my mother was too sassy for her own good; the dark, sweating men worried that my father's bad luck in inventing could ooze uninvited over the thresholds of their own homes. Consequently, I had begun to dream up play-mates. I wasn't the type of kid who saw someone beside me when I took out my Tinkertoys and my dominoes; I knew very well when I was alone that I was truly alone. But at night, I had the same dream over and over: another girl called to me, and together we rolled mud-burgers in our hands and pumped on swings until we both grazed the sun with our toes. The dream always ended the same way: I would get up the courage to ask the girl's name so that I'd be able to find her and play together again, and just before she answered I'd wake up.

And so it was that on that Sunday I opened my eyes already disappointed, to hear my father tugging his suitcase down the hall and my mother whispering goodbye and reminding him to call us later, after we got home from Saint Christopher's, to tell us how it went.

The morning started the way it always did. My mother made me breakfast—my favorite today, apple pancakes in the shape of my initials. She laid my pink lace last-year Easter dress on the foot of my bed. But when the time came to leave for Mass, my mother and I stepped into one of those perfect April days. The sun was as filling as a kiss, and the air held the promise of freshly mowed grass. My mother smiled and took my hand and headed up the street, away from Saint Christopher's. “On a day like this,” she said, “God didn't mean for us to rot away indoors.”

It was the first time that I realized my mother had a second life, one that had nothing at all to do with my father. What I had always assumed was spirituality was really just the side effect of the energy that hovered around her like a magnetic field. I discovered that when my mother wasn't bending to someone else's whims, she could be a completely different person.

We walked for blocks and blocks, coming closer to the lake, I knew, by the way the wind hung in the air. It became unseasonably warm as we walked, reaching into the high seventies, maybe even eighty. She let go of my hand as we came to the white walls of the Lincoln Park Zoo, which prided itself on its natural habitats. Instead of keeping the animals locked in, they cleverly kept the people out. There were few fences or concrete barriers. What kept the giraffes penned was a wide-holed grate that their legs would have slipped through; what kept the zebras in were gulleys too wide to leap. My mother smiled at me. “You'll love it here,” she said, making me wonder if she came often, and if so, whom she brought instead of me.

We were drawn to the polar bear exhibit simply because of the water. The free-form rocks and ledges were painted the cool blue of the Arctic, and the bears stretched in the sun, too warm in their winter fur. They slapped their paws at the water, which, my mother said, was just thirty-three degrees. There were two females and a cub. I wondered what the relationship was.

My mother waited until the cub couldn't take the heat anymore, and then she pulled me down a few shadowed steps to the underwater viewing lounge, where you could see into the underwater tank through a window of thick plexiglass. The cub swam right toward us, sticking its nose against the plastic. “Look, Paige!” my mother said. “It's kissing you!” She held me up to the window so that I could get a closer look at the sad brown eyes and the slippery whiskers. “Don't you wish you could be in there?” my mother said, putting me down and dabbing at my forehead with the hem of her skirt. When I did not answer her, she began to walk back up into the heat, still talking quietly to herself. I followed her; what else could I do? “There are many places,” I heard her whisper, “I'd like to be.”