treasured, and to know that despite your devotion it was dying by degrees. “Twenty years,” I whispered. “You must hate her so much.”
“Aye.” My father stood and grasped my hands. “At least as much as I love her.”
My father told me that my mother was born Maisie Marie Renault, in Biloxi, Mississippi. Her father had tried to be a farmer, but most of his land was swamp, so he never made much money. He died in a combine accident that was heavily questioned by the insurance company, and when she was widowed, Maisie’s mother sold the farm and put the money in the bank. She went to Wisconsin and worked for a dairy. Maisie began calling herself May when she was fifteen. She finished high school and got a job in a department store called Hersey’s, right on Main Street in Sheboygan. She had stolen her mother’s emergency money from the crock pot, bought herself a linen dress and alligator pumps, then told the personnel director at Hersey’s that she was twenty-one and had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin. Impressed by her cool demeanor and her smart outfit, they put her in charge of the makeup department. She learned how to apply blusher and foundation, how to make eyebrows where there were none, how to make moles disappear. She became an expert in the art of deception.
May wanted her mother to move to California. Years of leading the cows to the milking machines had chapped her mother’s hands and permanently bent her back. May brought home pictures of Los Angeles, where lemons could grow in your backyard and where there wasn’t any snow. Her mother refused to go. And so at least three times a year, May would start to run away.
She would take all her money out of the bank and pack her bag with only the most importbe n€.Chicago. Now, that’s farther than you went the last time.
It was on one of these excursions to Chicago that she met my father in a diner. Maybe she’d never finished her journey because she just needed an extra push. Well, that’s what my father gave her. She used to tell the neighbors that the day she laid eyes on Patrick O’Toole, she knew she was looking at her destiny. Of course she never mentioned if that was good or bad.
She married my father three months after she met him at the diner, and they moved into the little row house I would grow up in. That was 1966. She took up smoking and became addicted to the color TV they had bought with the money they got at their wedding. She watched
Because she thought she had to start somewhere, she took a job at the
She took me to the office with her three times a week, and the other two days I was watched by our next-door neighbor, an old woman who smelled of camphor. My father said May was good as a mother, but she never talked to me like I was a baby or did baby things like play patty-cake or hide-and-seek. When I was only nine months old, my father had come home to find me sitting at the threshold of the front door, wearing a diaper and a string of pearls, my eyes and lips colored with violet eye shadow and rouge. My mother had come running out of the living room, laughing. “Doesn’t she look perfect, Patrick?” she’d said, and when my father shook his head, all the life had gone out of her eyes. Things like that happened often when I was a baby. My father said she was trying to make me grow up faster so she’d have a good, close friend.
May left us without saying goodbye on May 24, 1972. My father said that what bothered him most about my mother’s disappearance was that he hadn’t seen it coming. He’d been married to her for six years, and he’d known so many details: the order in which she removed her makeup at night, the salad dressings she hated, the shifting color of her eyes when she needed to be held. But she had completely surprised him. For a while he bought the Los Angeles papers at an international newsstand, thinking she would certainly show up in Hollywood writing sitcoms and he’d get wind of it. But as the years went on, he began to suspect this: Surely anyone who could vanish without a trace could have been lying all those years. My father believed that the whole time they were married, she’d been getting together a plan. He resolved that if she ever did come back he wouldn’t let her in, because he had been wounded beyond repair. Unfortunately, he still found himself wondering from time to time if she was alive, if, mn€d tshe was all right. It was not that he expected to find word of her anymore; he had lost his faith in love. After all, it had been twenty years. If she appeared on his doorstep, she’d have been no more than a stranger.
My father came into my bedroom that night when the stars were starting to lose themselves in the yawn of the morning. “You’re awake, aren’t you,” he said, his brogue thick from a lack of sleep.
“You knew I would be,” I said. He sat down, and I took his hand in my own and looked up at him. Sometimes I could not believe all he had done for me. He had tried so hard.
“What will you do when you find her?” he said.
I sat up, pulling the covers with me. “I may not ever get that far,” I said. “It’s been twenty years.”
“Oh, you’ll find her, all right,” he said. “That’s the way it should be.” My father was a great believer in Fate, which he had twisted to mean Divine Wisdom. As far as he was concerned, if God meant for me to find May Renault, I would find her. “When you do find her, though, you shouldn’t be tellin’ her things she doesn’t need to know.” I stared at him, unsure of what he meant. “It’s too late, Paige,” he said.
Then I realized that maybe for the past two days I had been harboring a rosy image of my father, my mother, and me all living again under this roof in Chicago. My father was letting me know that wouldn’t happen, not on his end. And I knew that it couldn’t happen on my end, either. Even if my mother packed her bags and followed me home, my home was no longer Chicago. My home was miles away, with a very different man.
“Dad,” I said, pushing away the thought, “tell me a story again.” I had not heard my father’s stories in years, not since I was fourteen and decided I was too old to thrill to the exploits of muscled Black Irish folk heroes possessing wit and ingenuity.
My father smiled at my request. “I suppose you’ll be wantin’ a love story,” he said, and I laughed.
“There aren’t any,” I said. “There are only love stories gone wrong.” The Irish had a story for every infidelity. Cuchulainn-the Irish equivalent to Hercules-was married but seduced every maiden in Ireland. Angus, the handsome god of love, was the son of Dagda -king of the gods-and a mistress, Boann, while her husband was away. Deirdre, forced to marry the old king Conchobhar to avoid a prophecy of nationwide sorrow, eloped instead with a handsome young warrior named Naoise to Scotland. When messengers tracked and found the lovers, Conchobhar had Naoise killed and commanded Deirdre to marry him. She never smiled again, and eventually she dashed her brains out on a rock.
I knew all these stories and their embellishments well enough to tell them to myself, but all of a sudden I wanted to be tucked under the covers in my childhood bedroom, listening to the tumbling brogue of my father’s voice as he sang me the stories of his homeland. I settled under my blankets and closed my eyes. “Tell me the story of Dechtire,” I whispered.
My father placed his cool hand on my forehead. “‘Twas always your favorite,” he said. He lifted his chin and stared out at the sun coming over the edge of the buildings across the street. “Well, Cuchulainn was no ordinary Irishman, and he had no ordinary birth. His mother was a beautiful woman named Dechtire, with hair as bright as king’s gold and eyes greener than rich Irish rye. She was married to an Ulster chieftain, but she was too beautiful to escape the notice of the gods. And so one day she was turned into a bird, an even more beautiful creature than she had been before. She had feathers white as snow and wore a wreath braided from the pink clouds of mornin’; only her eyes were that same emerald green. She flew with fifty of her handmaidens to an enchanted palace on a lush isle in the sky, and there she sat, surrounded by her women, rufflin’ and settlin’ her wings.
“So nervous she was at first that she did not notice that she had been changed back into the beautiful woman she had been; nor did she notice the sun god, Lugh, standing before her and fillin’ up her sky. When she turned her head and looked at him, at the rays of light spillin’ from him in a bright halo, she immediately fell in love. She lived there with Lugh for many years, and there she bore him a son-Cuchulainn himself-but she eventually took her boy and went back home.”
I opened my eyes, because this was the part I liked best, and even before my father said it, I realized for the first time as an adult why this story had always held such power for me.
“Dechtire’s chieftain husband, who had spent years starin’ into the sky and just waitin’, welcomed her back, because after all, you never really stop lovin’ someone, now, and he raised Cuchulainn as his own.”
