Harvesting the Heart

  When he finished, he lined his fork and his knife neatly across the edge of the plate, the mark of someone with manners. He folded his paper and left it in his booth for others to read. It was then that he looked at me for the first time. He had the palest blue eyes I had ever seen, and maybe it was only because of the contrast with his dark hair, but it seemed I was just looking through this man and seeing, behind him, the sky. "Why, Lionel," he said, "there are laws that say you shouldn't hire kids until they're out of diapers." He smiled at me, enough to let me know I shouldn't take it personally, and then he left.

  Maybe it was the strain of my first half hour as a waitress; maybe it was the lack of sleep. I had no real reason. But I felt tears burning behind my eyes, and determined not to cry in front of Doris and Marvela, I went to bus his table. For a tip, he'd left ten cents. Ten lousy cents. It was not a promising beginning. I sank down onto the cracked banquette and rubbed my temples. I would not, I told myself, start to cry. And then I looked up and saw that Lionel had taped my portrait of him over the cash register. I stood, which took all my strength, and pocketed my tip. I remembered the rolling brogue of my father's voice telling me over and over again, Life can turn on a dime.

  A week after the worst day of my life, I had left home. I suppose I had known all along that I was going to leave; I was just waiting until I finished out the school term. I don't know why I bothered, since I wasn't doing well anyway--I'd been too sick for the past three months to really concentrate, and then all the absences started to affect my grades. I suppose I needed to know that I could graduate if I wanted to. I did just that, even with two D's, in physics and in religion. I stood up with the rest of my class at Pope Pius High School when Father Draher asked us to, I moved my tassel from right to left, I kissed Sister Mary Margareta and Sister Althea and told them that yes, I was planning to attend art school.

  I wasn't that far off the mark, since the Rhode Island School of Design had accepted me on my grades as a junior, which of course were recorded before my life had started falling apart. I was certain that my father had already paid part of the tuition for the fall, and even as I was writing him the note that told him I was leaving, I wondered if he'd be able to get it back.

  My father is an inventor. He has come up with many things over the years, but it has been his misfortune usually to be a step behind. Like the time when he invented that tie clip with a roll-down plastic screen, to protect the fabric during business lunches. He called it the Tidy-Tie and was sure it would be his key to success, but then he learned that something remarkably similar already had a patent pending. The same things happened with the fogless bathroom mirror, the floating key chain, the pacifier that unscrewed to hold liquid medicine. When I think of my father, I think of Alice, and the White Rabbit, and of always being one step behind.

  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.

  A bus from I don't know where was coming through the dark tunnel of the station. "I've been out of my head with worryin'," my father admitted.

  I watched the bus's wheels blot the herringbone-brick terminal drive. I thought of my father's Rube Goldberg contraptions, the inventions he'd made just to entertain me: a faucet that sent water down a gully, which released a spinning fan, which in turn blew a paddle that connected a pulley that opened the cereal box and poured out my serving of Cheerios. My father could make the best out of anything he was given. "Don't worry about me," I said confidently. "After all, I'm your daughter."

  "Aye," my father said, "but it seems you've got a bit of your mother in you too."

  After I'd worked two weeks at Mercy, Lionel trusted me enough to lock up. During the down times, like three in the afternoon, he'd sit me down at the counter and ask me to draw pictures of people. Of course I did the workers on my shift--Marvela and Doris and Leroy--and then I did the President and the mayor and Marilyn Monroe. In some of these portraits were the things I didn't understand. For example, Marvela's eyes showed a man dark with passion, being swallowed by the living sea. In the curl of Doris's neck I'd drawn hundreds of cats, each looking more and more like a human, until the last one had Doris's own face. In the fleshy swell of Marilyn Monroe's peach arm were not the lovers you'd expect but rolling farmland, rippled wheat, and the sad, liquid eyes of a pet beagle. Sometimes people in the diner noticed these things, and sometimes they didn't--the images were always small and subtle. But I kept drawing, and each time I finished, Lionel would tape the portrait over the cash register. It got so that the pictures stretched halfway across the diner, and with each one I felt a little more as though I truly belonged.

  I had been sleeping on Doris's couch, because she felt sorry for me. The story I had given was that my stepfather had been making moves on me and so the minute I turned eighteen I had taken my baby-sitting money and left. I liked that story, because it was nearly half true--the eighteen and the leaving part. And I didn't mind a little sympathy; at this point, I was taking whatever I could get.

  It was Doris's idea that we do some kind of blue-plate special-- tack two bucks onto the price of a turkey club, and you'd get a free portrait with it. "She's good enough," Doris said, watching me sketch the frizzy lines of Barbra Streisand's hair. "These Joe Shmoes would be Celebrity for a Day."

  I felt a little weird about the whole thing, kind of like being a circus sideshow, but there was an overwhelming response to the notice we stuck in the menu, and I got bigger tips drawing than I did waiting tables. I drew most of the regulars on the first day, and it was Lionel's idea to make those original sketches free and hang them up with my others for publicity. Truth be told, I could have drawn most of the diner's patrons without their posing for me.
I had been watching them carefully anyway, picking up the outlines of their lives, which I would fill in in my spare time with my imagination.

  For example, there was Rose, the blond woman who came for lunch on Fridays after having her hair done. She wore expensive linen suits and classic shoes and a diamond wedding band. She carried a Gucci pocketbook and she kept her money in order: ones, fives, tens, twenties. Once, she brought in a balding man, who held her hand tight throughout the meal and spoke in Italian. I pretended this was her lover, because everything else in her life seemed so picture perfect.

  Marco was a blind student at the Kennedy School of Government, who wore a long black overcoat even on the hottest days in July. He had shaved his head and wore a bandanna around it, and he'd play games with us. What color is it? he'd ask. Give me a clue. And I'd say something like "McCarthy," and he'd laugh and say Red. He came in late at night and smoked cigarette after cigarette, until a gray cloud hovered at the edge of the ceiling like an artificial sky.

  But the one I watched most was Nicholas, whose name I knew only because of Lionel. He was a medical student, which explained, Lionel said, his odd hours and the fog he was always in. I would stare at him point-blank because he never seemed to notice, even when he wasn't reading, and I tried to figure out what was so confusing about him. I had been at Mercy exactly two weeks when I figured it out: he just didn't fit. He seemed to gleam against the cranberry cracked vinyl seats. He held court over all the waitresses, holding up his glass when he wanted a refill, waving the check when he wanted to pay, and yet none of us considered him to be condescending. I studied him with a scientist's fascination, and when I imagined things about him, it was at night on Doris's living room couch. I saw his steady hands, his clear eyes, and I wondered what it was that drew me to him.