Harvesting the Heart (24 page)

Restless,
I pulled on my boots and went to stand on the porch. It was raining,
but I didn't particularly care. It was my only day off all week,
Nicholas was at the hospital, and I had to go somewhere—
anywhere—even if it wasn't to Borneo or Java. These days, I
seemed always to want to be moving. I twitched all night in bed,
never staying asleep for a full eight hours. I paced behind the
receptionist's desk at work. When I sat down to read, my fingers
fluttered at my sides.

I
pulled on my coat without bothering to button it and headed down the
street. I kept walking until I reached the heart of Cambridge. I
stood under the plexiglass hood of the T station, beside a black
woman with three children. She placed her hands on my stomach,
the way everyone did these days. A pregnant woman, I had discovered,
was public property. "You been sick?" the woman asked, and
I shook my head. "Then it's a boy." She pulled her children
out into the rain, and they walked toward Mass. Ave., jumping in
puddles.

I
wrapped my scarf around my head and moved into the rain again. I
walked down Brattle, stopping at a tiny fenced-in play yard attached
to a church. It was wet and empty, the slide still coated with last
week's snow. I turned away and kept moving down the street until the
storefronts and brick buildings faded into residential clapboard
mansions with spotty naked trees. I walked until I realized I was
going to the graveyard.

It
was a famous one, full of Revolutionary soldiers and startling
tombstones. My favorite was a thin slate, jagged and broken, that
announced the body of Sarah Edwards, who died of a bullet wound given
by a man not her husband. The graves, placed irregularly and close
together, looked like crooked teeth. Some of the markers had fallen
onto their sides and were strewn with vines and brambles. Here and
there a footprint was pressed into the frozen ground, making me
wonder who, other than me, came to a place like this.

As
a child, I had gone to graveyards with my mother. "It's the only
place I can think," she once told me. Sometimes she went just to
sit. Sometimes she went to pay her respects to near strangers. Often
we went together and sat on the smooth hot stones, worn down by
praying hands, and we spread between us a picnic.

My
mother wrote obituaries for the
Chicago
Tribune.
Most
of the time, she sat at a phone and took down the information for the
cheapest obituaries, the ones that were published in tiny black
print, like classifieds:
P
alermo
,
of Arlington, July 13, 1970. Antonietta (Rizzo), beloved wife of the
late Sebastian Palermo, devoted mother of Rita Fritzski and Anthony
Palermo. Funeral from the Delia Rosso Funeral Home, 356 South Main
St., Chicago, Monday at 9
a.m
.,
followed by a funeral Mass celebrated in Our Lady of the Immaculate
Conception Church, Chicago. Friends and relatives are respectfully
invited to attend. Interment Highland Memorial Cemetery,
Riverdale.

My
mother took dozens of these calls every day, and she told me over and
over again how she never failed to be surprised by the number of
deaths in Chicago. She would come home and reel off the names of the
deceased to me, which she had a knack for remembering the way some
people have a thing for telephone numbers. She never went to the
cemetery to see these people—the "classifieds"—at
least not intentionally. But from time to time her editor let her
write one of the real obituaries, the ones for semifamous people, set
in skinny columns like news articles.
herbert
r. quashner,
the
headline would read,
was
army lab foreman
.
My mother liked doing those best. "You get to tell a story,"
she'd say. "This guy used to be a member of the Destroyer Escort
Sailors Association. He was in World War II, on a submarine chaser.
He belonged to the Elks."

My
mother wrote these obituaries at home, sitting at the kitchen table.
She used to complain about deadlines, which she said was pretty
funny, given her business. When the articles were printed, she
clipped them neatly and stored them in a photo album. I used to
wonder what would happen to that album if we all died in a fire;
whether the police would think my mother had been a sick serial
killer. But my mother insisted on keeping a record of her work, which
she left behind, anyway, the day she disappeared.

My
mother would make a weekly list of the important names she wrote
about. Then on Saturday, her day off, we'd go to the closest
cemeteries, looking for the freshly turned earth that marked the
newest interments. My mother would kneel in front of the graves
of these people she hardly knew, still without headstones. She would
sift the fine brown dirt through her fingers like a sieve. "Paige,"
she'd say, throwing back her shoulders, "take a deep breath.
What can you smell?"

I
would look around and see the lilac bushes and the forsythia, but I
wouldn't take a deep breath. There was something about being in the
cemetery that made me monitor my breathing, as if without warning I
might find that I'd run out of air.

Once,
my mother and I sat under the red shade of a Japanese maple, having
visited the former Mary T. French, a public librarian. We had eaten
barbecued chicken and potato salad and had wiped our fingers on our
skirts, devil-may-care. Then my mother had stretched out across an
old grassy grave, resting her head on a flat marker. She patted her
thighs, encouraging me to lie down as well.

"You're
going to crush him," I said, very serious, and my mother
obligingly moved to the side. I sat down beside her and put my head
in her lap and let the sun wash over my closed eyes and my smile.

My
mother's skirt blew about, whipping the edge of my neck. "Mommy,"
I said, "where do you go when you're dead?"

My
mother took a deep breath, one that made her body puff like a
cushion. "I don't know, Paige," she said. "Where do
you think you go?"

I
ran my hand over the cool grass to my right. "Maybe they're all
underground, looking up at us."

"Maybe
they're in heaven, looking down," my mother said.

I
opened my eyes and stared at the sun until bursts of color exploded,
orange and yellow and red, like fireworks. "What's heaven like?"
I said.

My
mother had rolled to her side, sliding me off her lap. "After
sticking out life," she had said, "I hope it's whatever you
want it to be."

It
struck me as I moved through this Cambridge graveyard that my own
mother could be in heaven now. If there was a heaven; if she had
died. I wondered if she was buried in a state where it never snowed,
if she was in a different country. I wondered who came to lay lilies
at her grave and who had commissioned the inscription. I wondered if
her obituary would mention that she was the devoted mother of Paige
O'Toole.

I
used to ask my father why my mother left, and he told me over and
over the same thing: "Because she wanted to." As the years
went by he said it with less bitterness, but that didn't make the
words any easier to believe. The mother I imagined over the years,
the one with the shy smile and the full skirts, who had the power to
heal scrapes and bruises with a kiss and who could tell bedtime
stories like Scheherazade, would not have left. I liked to think
my mother was pulled away by forces greater than herself. Maybe it
was some international intrigue she was involved in, and the final
chapter meant trading her own identity to protect her family. For a
time I wondered if she was half of a pair of fated lovers, and I
almost forgave her running from my father if it meant being with the
man who held her heart. Maybe she was just restless. Maybe she was
looking for someone she had lost.

I
ran my hands over the smooth graves, trying to picture the face of my
mother. Finally, I came to a flat marker, and I lay down with my head
upon it, crossing my hands over the life in my belly, staring at the
ice in the sky. I stretched out on the frozen ground until it seeped
into my bones: the rain, the cold, these ghosts.

More
than anything else in the world, my mother had hated opening the
refrigerator and finding the juice pitcher empty. It was always my
father's fault; I was too little to pour for myself. It wasn't as
though my father did it on purpose. His mind was usually on other
things, and since it wasn't a priority, he never checked to see how
low the lemonade was when he stuck it back inside the Frigidaire.
Three times a week, at least, I would find my mother standing in the
slice of cold air from the open refrigerator, waving the blue juice
pitcher. "What is so damned difficult about mixing a can of
frozen Minute Maid?" she would yell. She'd stare at me. "What
am I supposed to do with a half inch of juice?"

It
was a simple little mistake, which she fashioned into a crisis, and
if I had been older I might have suspected the larger illness for the
symptoms, but as it happened I was five, and I didn't know any
better. I'd follow her as she tramped down the stairs to accost my
father in his workshop, brandishing the pitcher and crying and asking
nobody in particular what she had done to deserve a life like this.

The
year that I was five was the first time I was truly conscious of
Mother's Day. I had made cards before, sure, and I suppose I even had
my name tacked onto a present that my dad had bought. But that year I
wanted to do something that was straight from the heart. My father
suggested making a painting, or a box of homemade fudge, but that
wasn't the kind of gift I wanted to give. Those other things might
have made my mother smile, but even at five I knew that what she
really needed was something to take the ragged edge off the pain.

I
also knew I had an ace up my sleeve—a father who could make
anything my mind conjured up. I sat on the old couch in his workshop
one night late in April, my knees folded up, my chin resting on them.
"Daddy," I said, "I need your help." My father
had been gluing rubber paddles onto a cogwheel for some contraption
that measured chicken feed. He stopped immediately and faced me,
giving me his complete attention. He nodded slowly while I explained
my idea—an invention that would register when the lemonade in
the pitcher needed to be refilled.

My
father leaned forward and held both my hands. "Are you sure
that's the kind of thing your mother would be wantin'?" he
asked. "Not a handsome sweater, or some perfume?"

I
shook my head. "I think she wants something . . ." My voice
trailed off as I struggled to pick the right words. "She wants
something to make her stop hurting."

My
father looked at me so intently that I thought he was expecting
me to say more. But he squeezed my hands and tipped his head closer,
so our brows were touching. When he spoke, I could smell his sweet
breath, laced with the flavor of Wrigley's gum. "So," he
said, "you've been seein' it too."

Then
he sat on the couch beside me and pulled me onto his lap. He smiled,
and it was so contagious I could feel my legs already bouncing up and
down. "I'm thinkin' of a sensor," he said, "with some
kind of alarm."

"Oh,
Daddy, yes!" I agreed. "One that keeps ringing and ringing
and won't let you get away with just sticking the pitcher back."

My
father laughed. "I've never invented something before that will
mean
more
work
for me." He cupped my face in his palms. "But it's worth
it," he said. "Aye, well worth it."

My
father and I worked for two weeks in a row, from right after dinner
until my bedtime. We'd run to the workshop and try out buzzers and
alarms, electronic sensors and microchips that reacted to degrees of
wetness. My mother would knock from time to time on the door that led
to the basement. "What are you two doing?" she'd call.
"It's lonely up here."