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Published: November 12th 2007
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FICTION
first in a series FINBAR
Finbar Joyce’s back was as wide as an armoire.
If he sat in front of you at a theater, the stage would go dark. His head was proportionate, sitting atop those broad shoulders like a magically balanced boulder. Thick brows shadowed the deep-set blue eyes and gave off an air of profound thoughtfulness, as if everything he looked at sent him into bouts of contemplation. So angular was his jaw that it appeared as if the mandibles were made from two carpenter’s squares. As a younger man his hair was red, but now it was a coppery gray, as thick as winter wool.
Despite these granite-like characteristics, he walked with a singular grace, almost as if he were in slow motion. It was caused by the fact that Finbar only needed to take two steps to cover the ground of a normal man’s four. His strides were so long that it appeared as if he were floating rather than walking. He was still athletically lean, ten years after his retirement.
Finbar Joyce’s heart, however, was as soft and malleable as glazier’s putty. A television commercial made him cry once. And there was rarely a
movie that did not leave him wiping his eyes at one point or another. He was particularly vulnerable to the traditional songs of his youth in western Ireland. Every week, as his grandchildren were leaving his apartment in Boston, the tears flowed.
“Why’s he cryin’ Mommy?” they would ask.
“Oh pay no attention, that's just Granddad,” Mom would tell them.
“He’s nearly a holy well,” his dead wife Delia once commented.
There was nothing more precious to Finbar than his three daughters. His grandchildren in turn, the girls born to Finbar’s oldest two girls, Carmel and Kathleen, absolutely dissolved him on a weekly basis.
However it was the youngest, Margaret, who worked his heart to distraction. She was the one born with his red hair. Margaret was small and delicate like her mother. As a little girl she seemed to have tremendous concern for all things living. When she brought in the spring bird that had fallen from a nest, or the kitten she found in the street, Finbar would moisten.
“It’s good she’s was born here in America and not on the dirty old farm back home,” he would tell his wife Delia, “I don’t think she could bare to see how many creatures don’t make it at all.”
It was no surprise to Finbar that Margaret had chosen a life of service. Secretly, he had worried that she might become a nun. Although he was a religious man, the thought of her as a nun, taken from him and sent to somewhere, maybe to Africa, made him tremble. He was proud to tell his friends that Margaret was a Nurse, and working in one of the best hospitals in the world. The fact that she still lived close to him, and visited often, was something he did not take for granted.
“Sure don’t they come to where she works from all the country, all over the world,” he’d tell them, arching the great awnings that were his eyebrows and nodding his head in the solemn knowledge that he spoke an irrefutable truth.
Then came that Sunday afternoon in July.
She revealed her plans to him in short chapters. In the first, she told him that she had taken a new job with Catholic Charities. Initially he was disappointed, but proud nonetheless of her commitment. In the second, when she spoke of the pay cut, his spirits fell. It was absolutely counterintuitive, in Finbar’s mind, to work hard and not be rewarded. To voluntarily move down the monetary ladder was immigrant heresy. In the third, when she told him that Catholic Charities was sending her to work with AIDS patients, he felt a sudden shock of nausea and disbelief. But in the fourth, when she let him know that it would be in South Africa, Finbar’s great head teetered on its moorings, so drained of blood had it become.
“You’re only joking,” he said laughing, as if he’d just caught on to some game she was playing.
“No Dad I’m deadly serious,” she said, “it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. And, my God, they need the help so badly there. It’s a mess, really. I feel like I have to.”
After all these years Finbar was still oddly struck by his children’s flat American accents. He heard every word so clearly, so distinctly, not in the familiar groupings and phrasings of his own tongue. And they sounded so strange to him, foreign, especially at times like these when the words were laid out in such unambiguous and life changing clarity.
“Oh, this is a mighty mistake you’re making Peg,” he said, “a mighty mistake.”
He looked away from her into the kitchen. He faltered and waited. She in turn held her tongue, knowingly. Then his eyes swept the apartment slowly - past the picture frames of children and grandchildren crowded on the tables next to the television, to the photographs on the wall of his parents taken with him when he went back to Ireland the one and only time in 1964, to his own wedding pictures in Boston, then into the kitchen once again where the kettle was breathing its steam into a stream of sunlight. From the apartment below came the distinctive sound of a baseball game on the radio. He looked everywhere but at Margaret. He knew that it was important to avoid eye contact with her at this point. For it would be her eyes, set in ice blue determination, that would sink him as surely as the sun would sink this evening.
This Finbar knew as well as he knew anything in his life.
He lowered the footrest of his reclining chair, reaching down with his thick hand to the polished wooden lever. Margaret sat on the edge of a brown couch opposite him. Behind her the curtains billowed in and brought the smell of a barbecue from the yard next door.
“I don’t want to argue about this Dad,” Margaret said after the awkward silence. She felt sorry for him as she watched the color drain from his face, for she understood her power. His odd helplessness, this unnatural juxtaposition of size and vulnerability, made her waver. But she had made poor personal decisions in the past based on this observation, and how it had made her melt. She was determined to hold fast. After all this was her dream, albeit an unspoken one. Unspoken, because of exactly what she was experiencing at this moment. As certain as Finbar was of his daughter’s determination, she was also certain of her father’s fears and prejudices, and how they could affect her.
Yes, she would hold fast, she told herself. She would not be loosed from her dreams by this guilt. She knew exactly what to do.
“Look at me,” she said to her father.
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