Authors: Lynn Austin
“Not if you let me taste some of them. That would make me an accomplice.”
We spent a glorious afternoon together, tramping through the woods collecting a large basketful of mushrooms. Once I showed Patrick what they looked like, he was quicker at spotting them among the dead leaves than I was. He had a key to the cabin, and when we’d picked our fill, we went inside to stand side by side at the cabin’s sink. With our sleeves rolled, Patrick worked the rusty pump while I carefully rinsed the morels. After sauteing them in a cast-iron frying pan, using a little bacon Patrick had brought, we sat outside on the porch steps and ate every last one.
“Delicious!” he declared, licking his fingers. “And definitely worth going to jail for.”
“They’re much better if you use butter,” I said, laughing with my partner in crime.
It never once occurred to us that it was improper for two young people to be alone on an island, unchaperoned. If it had, neither of us would have cared. I only knew that when we finally said good-bye and I rowed back to shore, I left part of myself on the island. That night in bed, I cried.
“What’s wrong, Emma?” Eva whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said. And I didn’t. If I could have put what I felt into words, they would have been that I wanted to spend every day of my life as I had that day—with Patrick.
We met on the island the following weekend, not by prearrangement, but because we thought so much alike we both ended up there. We walked beneath the canopy of budding trees, inhaling the rich fragrance of woods and the earth. We sat on the stony beach and listened to the restless sound of the rushing river, allowing our surroundings to feed our souls. We tramped all over the island again, no longer searching for mushrooms but for music and poetry to share with each other.
When we came upon a pair of white birds in a marsh, Patrick pulled me down beside him in a clump of weeds to watch. “Look, Emma, look how they walk, how they fly! They’re God’s poetry.”
“I think they must be herons or egrets,” I whispered. “And they’re building a nest. Geese mate for life—I wonder if these birds do too?” As we watched in silent awe, Patrick reached for my hand and clasped it in his own as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Your hands are cold, Emma . . . do you want my jacket?”
“I’m not cold, just my hands.” He cupped them in his and lifted them to his face, breathing on them to warm them. From that first time he took my hand in his, we knew that we were part of each other. We had become lost somehow, but now that we’d found each other again, we would stay together. Always. We were the same person, really—two halves of the same apple. Nature abhorred the fact that we had to row to opposite shores of the river at the end of the day.
“I’m going to the dance at the Red Cross canteen tonight,” I said as I climbed into the boat to row home. “Why don’t you meet me there.”
“All right,” he promised. “I’ll meet you there.”
Patrick held me in his arms for the first time as we danced together that
night. “I should have warned you, I can’t dance,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter.” I enjoyed the warmth of his arms around me. “Just hold me close and pretend that you do.”
“Is that all there is to it?” he grinned. “That’s easy.”
For the remainder of the night, I turned all the other boys away. None of them could compare with Patrick. He was like a shining beacon that blotted out all the lesser suns around him. I needed his warmth, his light, to live. He also made me laugh. He may have been an Irish poet, but he was as full of fun and as restless for adventure as I was. The music and the laughter that rocked the canteen dissolved into the background as we danced together or sat at a table talking. We were causing a minor scandal—Protestant and Catholic holding hands—but we might have been alone in the woods for all we cared.
Late in the evening, while Eva danced with a boy from Papa’s church, Patrick and I slipped outside. The music grew fainter, the night sounds louder, as he led me to a shadowy lane behind the building. Then, holding me very close, Patrick kissed me for the first time. When our lips had to part again, I cried.
He didn’t need to ask the reason for my tears. He looked into my eyes and wiped my tears with his thumb and said, “I know, Emma . . . I know.”
The next day the sky fell. Papa summoned me into his study after the Sunday services. All morning I had wandered around in a fog of joy, thinking of Patrick as I sat in church, recalling his kiss as I helped Mama prepare chicken and dumplings for Sunday dinner. But the sight of Papa in his clerical collar, seated stiffly behind his desk, gesturing for me to sit in the chair facing him jolted me like a bucket of cold water. I perched nervously on the very edge of the seat, waiting.
“Emma, I’ve been told by several concerned people from our congregation that at the dance last night . . . that your behavior . . . that you behaved indecently.”
My heart pounded faster. “I’m surprised that you, of all people, would listen to gossip, Papa.”
“People tell me all sorts of things, Liebchen,” His voice was gentle but firm. “It’s my policy not to believe any of it unless I have proof that it is true. I’m asking you for the truth.”
I lifted my chin, trying to sound braver than I felt. “I don’t think I acted indecently.” The peaceful tranquility of Papa’s study did nothing to quiet my growing uneasiness. My eyes darted restlessly around the room, taking in all
of Papa’s neatly stacked books and papers. He waited until I met his gaze.
“Then, it isn’t true that you spent the entire evening dancing with a young man from St. Brigit’s Parish? That you turned away all the young men from our own church?”
“How is that indecent? Don’t I have a right to dance with whomever I want to?” I was skirting dangerously close to disrespect. Papa’s mouth formed a grim line.
“I was told that you openly held hands with this fellow all evening. And that you were seen together . . . kissing . . . behind the building.”
“The only thing that’s indecent is the fact that someone would spy on us!”
“Emma,” he said quietly, “I’m asking you if it’s true.”
My fear of God outweighed my fear of Papa. I couldn’t lie. “Yes, Papa. It’s true.”
He was quiet for a long time. I knew that he was praying for wisdom, carefully choosing his words. When he finally spoke, his voice was hushed. “You’ve abused my trust, Emma. You must have known, from all that I’ve taught you, that it was wrong to allow a young man to . . . to take liberties. And that it was also wrong to become involved with an unbeliever.”
“Patrick isn’t an unbeliever!”
“I was told that the young man you were seen with was Irish-Catholic.”
“You’ve met him, Papa. He helped us the day you were attacked. He came here to see how you were the next day. You’ve talked to Patrick, Papa. You know he isn’t a heathen.”
“I’m grateful for what he did that day. I’m appalled, however, by what the two of you did last night. Your behavior would be shameful even if it was with one of our own people.”
“
Our
people?”
“Yes. Our fellow German-Protestants.”
“These aren’t my people! I’m not German, I’m American! You and Mama have recreated the old country right here. You live in your own little world on this side of the river and you’re comfortable in it. But it’s not my world, Papa. I’m American. And the man I marry will also be American!”
Papa’s face went very white. “It is God’s will that you honor your parents by asking for their blessing on your marriage. It is never God’s will that you become unequally yoked with a man of a different faith, whether he is German, Irish, or American. I only hope that the shame of what you did won’t ruin your chances of marrying a respectable Christian man.”
“All we did was kiss!”
“That’s
all? A
kiss is something holy and God-given, Emma. A symbol of union. It should be reserved for a serious relationship, where there is a commitment that will eventually lead to marriage. It’s shameful when it’s done in dark alleyways and squandered on mere physical attraction.”
I stopped arguing with Papa, not because I agreed with him but because I saw that it was useless. He proceeded to spell out my punishment like the voice of God, inscribing the law on tablets of stone. “From now on you are forbidden to work at the canteen, forbidden to attend dances, forbidden to go into town unchaperoned, and forbidden to date any young man unless he attends our church and comes to the house first to escort you.”
I would be a prisoner, cut off from happiness and fun—and Patrick. “What
may
I do?” I muttered miserably.
“When you graduate from school in a few weeks, you may choose either courtship and marriage, or a job as a domestic helper with a respectable German family. Under no circumstances are you to be seen with Patrick. Do you understand, Emma?”
“Yes, Papa. I understand.”
He hadn’t forbidden me to go to Squaw Island.
The following Saturday I went—hoping, knowing, that I would meet Patrick. Papa had said I wasn’t to be seen with him, but no one would see us there.
Patrick was waiting for me on the dock. We both knew by the bottomless joy we felt that we were in love. I fell into his arms, hugging him with all my strength. He gasped in pain. It wasn’t until I stepped back and held his face in my hands that I noticed all the cuts and bruises. “Patrick, what happened?”
“Some Irish blokes saw us together at the dance. They tried to convince me not to see you anymore, so we had a bit of a scuffle.”
“A scuffle! You look as though you’ve been through the war! Are you all right?”
“I am now. Come on, let’s sit on the cabin steps, where we can’t be spied upon.”
“I thought only Papa and his congregation were that narrow-minded,” I said as I gently kissed Patrick’s bruised knuckles.
“No, we’ll have to fight centuries of Protestant hatred on my side of the river. There were about six of them who sat me down to spell things out. ‘How can you be forgetting what her people did to ours all those years?’ they asked. ‘Emma isn’t an Irish-Protestant landlord,’ I told them. ‘What about all the martyrs who died for our faith, Paddy? When it was illegal to hold Mass
. . . when priests hid in caves? And now you want to marry one of them?’”
I froze, my lips still pressed to his hand. “You said what?”
“I told them I wanted to marry you. It’s true, I do . . . that is, if you’ll have me. Careful!” he cried when my arms flew around him again. “That’s how I got my ribs all smashed up—when I told them I was in love with you and nothing anyone said or did could keep us apart.”
My father had called it a physical attraction—and it was that. Patrick and I were like two sides of a wound trying to knit themselves together again to heal and be whole. But it was so much more than a physical attraction. We talked without ever saying a word. We both saw life so much more clearly when we were together, as if each was the spectacles the other needed to correct his vision. We could have lived happily on our island ignoring the rest of the world if we both hadn’t yearned to see it so badly. Patrick’s passion for life burned as brightly as mine, and he was as dissatisfied with the thought of living an ordinary life as I was.
Hand in hand, we walked down to the marsh to see the white birds we had watched all spring. We found them guarding their nest. As we sank down into our thicket to watch, Patrick drew me into his arms.
“We can be married as soon as I turn twenty-one in October,” he said. “If people can’t accept us here, we’ll become vagabonds, roaming from city to city until we’ve seen every city in the world.”
“I’ll play the piano when we run out of money,” I said, laughing.
“And I’ll work at odd jobs until we can earn train fare to the next town. We’ll live like outlaws.”
“I’d rob a bank for the chance to spend my life with you.”
“Where shall we go first, Emma? I’ve always wanted to see the Pacific Ocean.”
“Do they have orange trees out there? I’ve always wanted to see oranges growing on trees.”
“When fall comes,” Patrick said, “and the white birds fly away, we’ll fly away with them.”
Two days after I finished school I started work. Papa had found a job for me with a German farm family with seven children. They lived up the river near the Metzgers. I agreed to work there, provided that I didn’t have to live there. Patrick and I continued to meet on the island that summer, falling ever more deeply in love. He recited volumes of beautiful poetry to me as we sat
beneath the trees—some by Irish poets, some that he had written himself. We counted the days until his twenty-first birthday on October ninth.
One scorching day near the end of August, I was surprised to find Papa waiting outside with the carriage to take me home when I finished work. “I’m so glad to see you, Papa,” I said as I climbed up beside him. “I wasn’t looking forward to the long walk home in this heat. I spent all morning in a steaming kitchen and all afternoon manhandling sweaty children. I feel like a wilted flower.” I leaned against the carriage seat and peeled my dress away from my sticky skin, longing for a bath. The horses trotted down the road.
Papa didn’t slow the wagon when we got to the parsonage. We rode past it. “Where are you going, Papa?”
“Be quiet, Emma.” The ice in his voice sent a chill down my spine, in spite of the heat. When we crossed the river, I almost asked him to stop the wagon, afraid that I might be sick. Papa was never this cold, this still, unless he was very angry. And if he was angry with me, then it could only be because of Patrick.
He drove to where Patrick worked and stopped the wagon. We waited in agonized silence beneath a relentless sun until Patrick emerged through the doors. Papa climbed down from the wagon seat and slowly walked toward him. “May I have a word with you, please . . . about my daughter?”
Patrick looked startled, then wary. By the time they walked back to where Papa had parked the wagon, I saw by the fire in Patrick’s eyes and on his flushed cheeks that he was angry too. I could barely climb down beside them on my quivering legs.
“I’ve been told that you’ve been meeting my daughter on Squaw Island, unchaperoned. Is this true?”